Do many of these mutations seem familiar to you, if you know anything about Omicron?
These are samples collected from NYC wastewater earlier this year, proving the virus can mutate really fast to adapt to animal hosts without the need of immunocompromised patients. I'm increasingly leaning toward a zoonotic origin for this one - rodents, cats, or dogs.
This would also have awkward implications such as the fact that no amount of vaccination would have prevented its emergence...
Intringuingly, even though the WNY4 sample is even more mutated than Omicron, its RBD was still neutralized with a significant but not catastrophic 5 to 7-fold reduction in titers (about 1,4 - 1,9 times more resistant than Beta's RBD).