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What to know about the highly mutated new COVID strain found in Mass. wastewater
Nicknamed the “cicada” variant due to its lengthy hibernation, BA.3.2 derives from a strain that first emerged in late 2021 to 2022.
A heavily mutated new COVID-19 variant that’s picking up steam around the world has officially landed in Massachusetts, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The “highly divergent” variant, BA.3.2, was first detected in South Africa in November 2024, the CDC said. It spread to 23 countries as of Feb. 11, and federal health officials say the strain has also been detected in 132 wastewater samples from Massachusetts and 24 other states.
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Nicknamed the “cicada” variant due to its stealth and lengthy hibernation, BA.3.2 derives from a strain that first emerged during late 2021 to 2022, according to the CDC. The variant’s time jump also has implications for COVID vaccination: health officials have said early studies suggest BA.3.2 is “efficiently” evading antibodies from the 2025-2026 shots, which are largely aimed at the predominant JN.1 strains.
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“The number of mutations from JN.1 viruses makes it less likely that the current vaccines will be highly effective against Cicada, but we need more data to better answer this question,” Dr. Robert H. Hopkins Jr., medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, told USA TODAY.
“It is possible we will see Cicada become the dominant strain in the U.S., but that is by no means certain,” he added. “I have heard some concern raised about the possibility that it could drive a U.S. summer surge.”
The CDC likewise warned that new variants “with substantial capacity to evade immunity from previous infections or vaccines could be associated with seasonal increases in COVID-19 activity.”
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According to the World Health Organization, however, current COVID vaccines are expected to continue protecting against severe disease. Moreover, WHO said BA.3.2 doesn’t seem to be making people sicker so far and hasn’t resulted in increased hospitalizations and deaths.
“Overall, available evidence suggests that BA.3.2 poses low additional public health risk compared with other circulating Omicron descendent lineages,” WHO said.
And unlike previous strains, BA.3.2 hasn’t rapidly overtaken other variants; in fact, it hasn’t fueled enough cases nationally to land on the CDC’s variant tracker.
“If it had really special advantages, we’d probably have seen it take off and dominate globally relatively quickly,” Andrew Pekosz, a virologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told TODAY.com. “We didn’t see that, but it’s not going away, so it’s something to keep an eye on.”
COVID cases in Massachusetts have remained relatively low following an uptick around the holidays, and wastewater data reflects similar trends.
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