The Vietnamese Health Ministry said on Saturday they have detected a new COVID-19 variant which spreads quickly by air and is a combination of variants first identified in India and the UK, according to state media.
The variant is believed to be responsible for the recent wave of COVID-19 cases in the country, reports CTV News Canada. After containing the virus for most of 2020, since late April this year, Vietnam is now grappling with a spike in infections.
Over 6,700 cases including 47 deaths have been reported in Vietnam, most of which have occurred since April. The virus has caused fresh outbreaks across more than half of its territory including industrial zones and big cities such as Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.
“We have discovered a new hybrid variant from the Indian and the UK strains,” the health minister, Nguyen Thanh Long, was quoted as telling a national meeting on the pandemic on Saturday, according to The Guardian.
“The characteristic of this strain is that it spreads quickly in the air. The concentration of virus in the throat fluid increases rapidly and spreads very strongly to the surrounding environment.”
Long also said that before this latest discovery, there had been seven known coronavirus variants in Vietnam, specifically, the B.1.222, B.1.619, D614G, B.1.1.7 – known as the U.K. variant, B.1.351, A.23.1 and B.1.617.2 – the “Indian variant.”
Long was quoted as saying that authorities would soon announce the name and detailed characteristics of the newly discovered variant.
The news from Vietnam comes as India continues to struggle after the coronavirus overwhelmed hospitals, and created a dire shortage of medical supplies in the country, reports The Hill.
