FAIRMONT – While COVID rates remain low, a new variant called Cicada has made its way into Minnesota.

Public Health Sanitarian for Faribault and Martin County Health and Human Services Tim Langer said this discovery was made through wastewater monitoring.

“There have been only two cases in the state of Minnesota as of today,” he said. “I confirmed that with the state health department, and those are two clinical cases. As far as locally, we are not tracking COVID right now. It’s just been such low cases.”

Cicada is a variant of the Omicron strain of COVID. Thankfully, Langer said this is less severe than other COVID strains.

“Starting in 2020, we had a Delta variant, and we had the original variant,” he said. “They were much more severe. They typically involved the lungs, often required ventilation and caused death. When Omicron came out a couple years later, the virus appeared not to be affecting the lungs as much. It was primarily cold-like symptoms.”

Right now, Langer said there’s no evidence it is any more severe than other Omicron variants, but it’s by no means harmless.

“It has about 72 mutations in it, which make it somewhat different than the other variants,” he said. “There’s some questions now in regard to this particular variant and how it may be able to escape some immunities of the vaccine. They’re just learning more about that right now.”

With Omicron variants presenting with cold-like symptoms, he said it is important to get tested when you feel sick with cold or flu-like symptoms.

“Testing for COVID is still very effective,” Langer said. “That is one way of sorting it out. In the clinical setting, they can do testing for you and determine what variant of influenza you have and whether or not you have COVID.”

Langer recommends vaccination against COVID, especially if you have risk factors for severe disease, are of older age, have chronic health conditions and/or are pregnant or immunocompromised.

There are also several things you can do to try to stay healthy and avoid sickness altogether.

“Stay home when you’re ill,” Langer said. “If you are symptomatic, get tested. Keep vaccinations up to date. Consider masking if you are at a higher risk, if you have some of those risk factors or if you’re out in crowds. I’m still hearing cases of long COVID, [where] you can have symptoms for years after the illness. I think it’s fairly rare, but you want to be aware of those risks as well.”

For more information, visit cdc.gov/covid/.