In November 2024, a nose swab from a young boy, 5 years old, in South Africa turned up a coronavirus that looked nothing like its parent. Most new offshoots of a variant differ by a handful of gene changes. This one, BA.3.2, carries 53 changes to its spike protein against BA.3, and roughly 70 against the virus that first emerged in 2019.
It then went quiet for a long time, and that earned it a nickname: Cicada.
A branch that vanished and returned
Omicron spread worldwide in late 2021, and sequencing found five main branches in its family tree. Four of them went on to cause waves of infection. BA.3 did not: it appeared in 2022 and then fell silent. T. Ryan Gregory, who studies evolution at Canada’s University of Guelph, says scientists think BA.3 spent two years infecting a single person whose immune system could not fully clear it. Long infections like that put constant pressure on a virus and keep it changing, and sometimes the virus re-emerges afterwards.
After South Africa, it resurfaced in Mozambique in March 2025, and cases followed across Europe. The first US case was an adult who had travelled from the Netherlands. By February 11, 2026, the US CDC counted it in more than 23 countries. The agency’s own published data, as of March 12, 2026, put it in 29 patients, plus 260 wastewater samples spread over 29 states and Puerto Rico. The World Health Organization has labelled it a variant it is monitoring, which is below a variant of interest or of concern.
Mutations, but little momentum
The spike changes matter because that is the part of the virus that docks onto cells. In laboratory studies the strain efficiently evades antibodies, the CDC researchers wrote, likely because of those mutations. Yet it has not taken over. Somewhere along the way it lost its grip on ACE-2, the receptor it needs to get into cells, and that has made it a middling competitor.
In Germany, BA.3.2 made up an estimated 30% of new infections from November through January before showing signs of decline, according to Florian Krammer, a virologist at New York’s Mount Sinai. His team found that vaccine antibodies from the 2024-25 shots dealt with it fairly quickly.
The WHO’s analysis found no sustained growth advantage over other circulating variants and no data pointing to more severe illness, hospitalisation or death. Patients report the same complaints as with recent Omicron subvariants, from fever and sore throat to a cough.
Scientists are split on what comes next. Marc Johnson, a University of Missouri professor who tracks the virus in wastewater, thinks it has a decent chance of becoming dominant, though “it certainly isn’t a sweeping variant like many we’ve seen before.” Alex Greninger at the University of Washington was blunter: “It’s not a nothingburger, but it’s like adding grilled onions to your burger.” Tulio de Oliveira, who directs a South African epidemic response centre, does not believe it belongs in the next vaccine.
One pattern stands out. An analysis of New York City data found that kids were around five times as likely to catch BA.3.2 as to catch other variants.
Sources
- Kids may be more likely to get the new ‘Cicada’ variant of Covid-19. Here’s what to know about BA.3.2
- COVID’s Cicada Invasion Doesn’t Yet Prompt Concerns
- Mint Explainer: Should you be concerned about the new covid variant? | Today News
