People across at least 10 states have now been infected by BA.2.86, a highly mutated variant of the virus that causes COVID-19 that authorities have been closely tracking.
According to data tallied from the global virus database GISAID, labs have reported finding BA.2.86 in samples from Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington.
Estimates suggest BA.2.86 still remains a small fraction of new COVID-19 cases nationwide.
Too few sequences of the virus have been reported to show up on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s biweekly variant estimates, which still show that a long list of closely related XBB variant descendants are driving virtually all infections around the country.
“The diversity is less than what appears. Many of these lineages actually have identical spike sequences. We’ve observed this before, where we see convergent evolution and viruses evolving to have the same substitutions,” said Natalie Thornburg, a laboratory branch chief in the CDC’s Coronaviruses and Other Respiratory Viruses Division.