Mysterious Covid-19 variant found in New York City wastewater

A potential sign of a new undetected Covid-19 variant has been found in New York City’s wastewater that hasn’t made its way through the city or the country yet. Last year in January, a team of researchers in New York City were searching for the coronavirus in the city’s wastewater when they discovered something strange in their samples.

They found viral fragments with a unique collection of mutations for a Covid-19 variant that had never been discovered before. There is no evidence whatsoever, that the lineages pose an elevated health risk to humans. But the researchers have no idea where they came from. The findings of the study have been published in Nature Communications on Thursday

The scientists are calling them ‘cryptic lineages’, which have continued to pop up in the city’s wastewater. “At this point, what we can say is that we haven’t found the cryptic lineages in human databases, and we have looked all over,” said Monica Trujillo, a microbiologist at Queensborough Community College and an author of the new paper.

While some researchers feel that the virus is coming from people whose infections aren’t being captured by sequencing, there are some who believe that the lineages may be coming from virus-infected animals, possibly rats.

The researchers have been sampling wastewater from 14 treatment plants in New York City since June 2020. In January of 2021, they began doing targeted sequencing of the samples, focusing on part of the gene for the virus’s all-important spike protein.

Viral fragments with novel patterns of mutations appeared repeatedly at a handful of treatment plants, the researchers found. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have also found similar sequences in one California sewershed, a microbiologist at the University said.