The journal Nature Communication has been tracing the origins of “mystifying virus fragments found over the last year in New York’s sewage” reports the New York Post. The study was published this month which found “cryptic lineages” are different than all known COVID variants.
As a result, scientists believe a new version of the virus could be coming from the “city’s dank underbelly” as the Post puts it. Some researchers believe the latest unknown variant could be a yet unsequenced human strain, others believe it’s rat-born.
Marc C. Johnson, a University of Missouri virologist and co-author of the new study says part of why they believe it is from rats is “One of the amino-acid changes that we’re seeing in the virus has not been seen in patients. Ever. But this amino-acid change has been seen in rodent-adapted virus, which really says something to me.”
“They’re probably drinking sewer water, and I heard they eat feces, so if there’s any clumps of material in the wastewater, I’m sure they might try to consume it,” study co-author and Queens College virologist John Dennehy told the outlet.
“We’ve never detected live virus in the wastewater. But given the volume of wastewater and the number of rats, it’s certainly possible that they’ve gotten infected that way.”
“John would go wandering around dark alleys at night and collect rat feces for me and he’d put them in Ziploc bags, label them, and send them to me,” explained Johnson, of how they are collecting samples to conduct the study.
Johnson said his “brave” undergraduates plugged their noses while extracting RNA from rat poop samples. We can remain hopeful, cause “while the researchers found no evidence that COVID-19 is circulating through NYC’s rat population, they still believe the vermin are ‘likely candidates’ to originate the next, yet unknown variant of the disease.
If that happens, says the study, the best possibility will be that the new variant “can only infect rats and loses the ability to infect humans.” And the worst? That “it spills back into humans and it’s Pi,” and becomes a new variant of the coronavirus.
NYC is starting to ease COVID restrictions. Would it strengthen backup and put mandates back into place for rats?