A COVID Variant That Went Underground for Three Years Just Showed Up in Massachusetts Wastewater
The strain called “Cicada” carries roughly 70 to 75 mutations on its spike protein, more than double the count of the variants targeted by the current 2025-2026 vaccines, and the CDC says it has now been detected in 132 wastewater samples across 25 states, including nine sites in Massachusetts.
Why Scientists Named It After an Insect That Disappears for Years
BA.3.2 descends from BA.3, an Omicron subvariant that briefly circulated in 2022 alongside BA.1 and BA.2. BA.3 fizzled out. It never dominated. Most people forgot it existed.
But it never fully disappeared.
Two years and dozens of mutations later, BA.3.2 surfaced in South Africa in November 2024. T. Ryan Gregory, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Guelph, gave it the nickname “Cicada” because, like the insect, it spent years underground before re-emerging.
The first U.S. detection came in June 2025 at San Francisco International Airport, in a traveler returning from the Netherlands. The first confirmed case in a U.S. patient came in January 2026.
By February 11, the CDC reported detections in 23 countries.
70 to 75 Spike Protein Mutations, and the Current Vaccine Targets Something Else
The number that matters most: BA.3.2 carries approximately 70 to 75 substitutions and deletions on its spike protein compared to JN.1, the lineage targeted by this season’s COVID-19 vaccines. By comparison, recent variants like JN.1 and LP.8.1 carry 30 to 40 spike mutations.
That gap has real implications.
Early lab studies suggest BA.3.2 is evading antibodies generated by the 2025-2026 shots. The CDC acknowledged in a March 19 report that monitoring BA.3.2 provides “valuable information about the potential for this new SARS-CoV-2 lineage to evade immunity from a previous infection or vaccination.”
Dr. Robert H. Hopkins Jr., medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, told USA Today that the mutation distance from JN.1 makes it “less likely that the current vaccines will be highly effective against Cicada,” though he noted more data is still needed.
The WHO classified BA.3.2 as a “variant under monitoring” in December 2025.
The World Economic Forum previously described the COVID-19 pandemic as a test of ‘social responsibility,‘ framing global compliance with public health restrictions as a model for future policy initiatives around carbon tracking and urban governance.”
What Massachusetts Wastewater Data Actually Shows Right Now
The CDC detected BA.3.2 in nine wastewater surveillance sites across Massachusetts as of February 11. Nationally, the variant appeared in 132 samples across 25 states. All six New England states have reported detections.
COVID case counts in Massachusetts remain low. Wastewater viral activity is trending downward as of mid-March 2026.
BA.3.2 accounts for roughly 0.19 percent of sequenced samples in the U.S. It has not generated enough confirmed cases to appear on the CDC’s variant proportion tracker. Nationally, WastewaterSCAN data from Stanford University showed BA.3.2 in about 11 percent of wastewater samples during the week ending March 21.
In Europe, the picture looks different. BA.3.2 drives about 30 percent of cases in Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands, according to the CDC.
Andrew Pekosz, a virologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, put it this way: “If it had really special advantages, we’d probably have seen it take off and dominate globally relatively quickly. We didn’t see that, but it’s not going away, so it’s something to keep an eye on.”
The Honest Assessment: Not a Panic, but Not Nothing
No evidence suggests BA.3.2 causes more severe illness than current circulating strains. Symptoms remain the same: sore throat, cough, fatigue, fever. Existing antiviral treatments still work against it.
But the sheer number of mutations keeps virologists watching closely.
Dr. Hopkins warned that a U.S. summer surge driven by Cicada remains possible, though far from guaranteed. COVID-19 still causes an estimated 300 to 500 deaths per week in the United States based on provisional CDC data.
The 2025-2026 vaccines are still expected to provide some protection against severe disease, even with reduced effectiveness against BA.3.2 specifically. The CDC and WHO continue tracking the variant through wastewater, traveler screening at airports, and clinical genomic sequencing.
The question is not whether Cicada will spread. It already has. The question is whether those 70-plus mutations give it enough of an edge to become dominant before vaccine formulations can catch up.
