Recent wastewater samples from communities across Missouri have identified the presence of the faster-spreading UK variant of the coronavirus, state health officials have announced.

Researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia created the Coronavirus Sewershed Surveillance Project in partnership with the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services and Department of Natural Resources.

The case was discovered in Marion County in northeast Missouri, and contact tracing has not associated it with any other cases, state health officials have said.

“While this remains the only confirmed human case of its kind in the state, epidemiologists say it is clear that this variant has been found in samples in various locations throughout the state based on this continued wastewater surveillance,” read the press release from the state health department.

Reached by a reporter on Sunday, Marc Johnson, a university virologist helping lead the sewershed project, said that the variant was detected in more than 13 of the wastewater systems across the state.

In most of the systems, the variant made up less than 1% of coronavirus genetic material collected from the samples, Johnson said.

The other, Johnson said he did not want to name before getting approval from state health officials.

Local health departments would likely have already begun seeing a spike in cases by the time researchers notified them of testing results, Johnson said.

As part of a national variant monitoring program, the Missouri State Public Laboratory has been sending COVID-19 cases samples with genetic signs of variants to the CDC and the regional public health laboratory in Minnesota for sequencing.