Rodents, infected through city sewers, could carry the next variant.
After deer infected with the Omicron variant, rats. A scientific study, published in the journal Nature in early February, indicates that rats in New York carry different variants of Covid. Scientists have indeed analyzed “cryptic lineages” present in the waste water of the Big Apple. These are different from the variants already listed, making researchers fear a new mutation of the virus. “We offer several hypotheses for the anomalous presence of these lineages, including the possibility that they are derived from unsampled human Covid-19 infections or that they indicate the presence of a non-human animal reservoir.” writing.
Virologist Marc C. Johnson, from the University of Missouri and co-author of the study, explains to the New York Post “Among the changes we have seen are the amino acids present in the virus, which do not affect patients. At all. But this change in amino acids is observed in rodents”. He also adds that rodents are not infected with the original strain of the virus, but with the Alpha, Beta and Gamma variants.
Contaminated with sewage and faeces
John Dennehy, a virologist from Queens College and also co-author of the study, analyzes: “They are probably drinking sewage, and I heard that they were eating feces, so if there has clumps of matter in the sewage, I’m sure they might try to consume it. We have never detected any virus present in the wastewater. But given the volume of sewage and the number of rats, it’s certainly possible that they were infected that way.”
Furthermore, the scientists’ process for detecting the presence of the virus in the rats was no picnic. “John would walk around the dark alleys at night and pick up rat droppings for me. He put them in Ziploc bags, labeled them and sent them to me,” says Marc C. Johnson. He specifies that it was his “brave” undergraduate students who took the samples of the RNA present in the animals’ feces, “by plugging their noses”.
The “most likely” candidates for the next variant
Although researchers have found no evidence that Covid-19 is circulating in the New York rat population, they remain confident that rodents are the “most likely candidates” to be the source of the next variant – yet unknown – of the virus.
If so, it is also possible that this new variant “can only infect rats and loses the ability to infect humans”. In the worst case, the risk is “that it affects humans and it will be Pi”, future name of the next variant.
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