Featured Image Credit: Getty Stock Image
Topics: Covid-19, Health, US News, World News
Madison Burgess
Topics: Covid-19, Health, US News, World News
A new heavily mutated COVID-19 variant, which has been 'underground' for years, is spreading through the United States.
Health officials have shared that the BA.3.2 strain, which is nicknamed 'Cicada' and is a descendant of Omicron, has been identified in 25 US states and 23 countries around the world.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has found evidence of the variant in wastewater samples across states, including California, Florida, Illinois, and New York.
The first case occurred in June 2025 in a participant traveling to the US from the Netherlands, and while global levels are still low, health experts and regulatory bodies are keeping an eye on it and monitoring the situation.
Advert
BA.3.2 earned its 'Cicada' nickname, as like the cicada insects, it remained underground for years before suddenly emerging.
A press release shared by the CDC on 19 March details that as of 11 February, the strain has been detected in nasal swabs from four travellers, three plane wastewater samples, clinical samples from five patients, and 132 wastewater samples from the states.
The main question that's circulating over the new strain is whether or not the current COVID-19 vaccinations protect against it.
As of right now, the answer is not exactly clear, but scientists are monitoring the situation.
The CDC report outlines that 'monitoring the spread provides valuable information about the potential for this new SARS-CoV-2 lineage to evade immunity from a previous infection or vaccination'.
Health officials say that while the previously administered vaccines do provide protection against the currently circulating predominant US variants, laboratory studies have shown that the recently emerged 'Cicada' strain 'efficiently evades antibodies, likely because of spike protein mutations'.
It's set apart from the other variants circulating because it's considered to be 'highly mutated' with between 70 and 75 mutations.
Andrew Pekosz, Ph.D., a virologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told TODAY: "It has a lot of mutations that may cause it to look different to your immune system."
The symptoms of BA.3.2 are similar to those caused by other variants that are circulating right now.
Common COVID-19 symptoms in 2026 include:
As for whether it could make people sicker, epidemiologist Dr. Syra Madad told HuffPost: "That’s really the big question with any COVID variant at this point. So far there is no evidence that it is causing more severe illness on a population level."