For over a year, Vietnam escaped the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic, recording only a handful of infections. However, a surge of cases in May brought the country’s total to 6,713 cases, with outbreaks recorded in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, as the country’s fourth wave of infections shows signs of becoming its largest.
Now, Vietnamese health authorities say they have identified a new strain of the virus after running genetic sequencing on several COVID-19 patients, one that blends mutations from the variant discovered in India as well as the one identified in the UK.
"After running gene sequencing on newly detected patients, we have discovered a new variant that is a mix of India and UK ones," news website VnExpress quoted Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long as saying.
"More specifically, it is an Indian variant with mutations that originally belonged to the UK variant,” he said. "The new variant is very dangerous," Reuters quoted him as saying.
“The Ministry of Health would announce the new coronavirus variant on the global genome map,” he said, adding that the new variant had yet to be named.
The report did not specify the specific variant identified from India—while the B.1.617 strain is the dominant variant in India, it accounts for around 55 per cent of the total “variants of concern” that have been detected in India, Health Minister Harsh Vardhan had said on Monday.
The dominant variant in the UK, the B.1.1.7 variant, is known to be more transmissible, while the B.1.617 variant is said to be more adept at evading the human body’s immune response. Both variants are known to be more transmissible.
The World Health Organisation on Wednesday said that the B.1.617 variant had been found in 53 territories across the world. WHO said the variant showed increased transmissibility, with its disease severity and risk of infection was still under investigation.
Vietnam has sought to speed up its vaccination campaign, having administered over 1 million doses to its population of around 98 million. The country has approved the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and the Sputnik V vaccine.
