Hanoi May 30 : After successfully containing the virus for the almost a full year, Vietnam on Saturday detected a new coronavirus variant that is a combination of the Indian and UK COVID-19 variants and authorities said that the variant can spread quickly by air. At this moment, the country is grappling with a rise in infections since late April that accounts for more than half of the total 6,856 registered cases. So far, there have been 47 deaths recorded in the country.
“Vietnam has uncovered a new COVID-19 variant combining characteristics of the two existing variants first found in India and the UK,” Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long told news agency Reuters.
He said that the new coronavirus variant is an Indian variant with mutations that originally belong to the UK variant is very dangerous. Notably, Vietnam had previously detected seven virus variants: B.1.222, B.1.619, D614G, B.1.1.7 – known as the UK variant, B.1.351, A.23.1 and B.1.617.2 – the “Indian variant”.
On the other hand, the World Health Organization (WHO) has also identified four variants of SARS-CoV-2 of global concern. These include variants that emerged first in India, Britain, South Africa and Brazil.
However, the country which has about 98 million people so far received only 2.9 million doses and aims to secure 150 million this year.
The health minister, however, did not specify the number of cases recorded with this new variant but said Vietnam will soon announce the discovery in the world’s map of genetic strains.
There were seven known coronavirus variants in Vietnam before Long’s announcement, according to the Ministry of Health.