Virologist Dave O’Connor and his colleagues have been tracking a heavily mutated variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. They discovered the variant in Wisconsin waste water drawn from more than 100,000 people. They thought that the variant might be circulating in dogs, in part because they found canine genetic material in the same wastewater samples. Similar-looking variants have turned up in people with compromised immune systems — and, increasingly, researchers think that variants from chronic infections in these people might give rise to pandemic-altering lineages, such as Omicron.Read Long Article
