People across at least 10 states have now been infected by BA.2.86, a highly mutated variant of the virus that causes COVID-19 that authorities have been closely tracking. According to data tallied from the global virus database GISAID, labs have reported finding BA.2.86 in samples from Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington. Estimates suggest BA.2.86 still remains a small fraction of new COVID-19 cases nationwide. Too few sequences of the virus have been reported to show up on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's biweekly variant estimates, which still show that a long...