Vietnam’s Health Ministry announced Saturday that it had detected a highly transmissible new variant of the coronavirus that has helped fuel a recent wave of infections in the vietnam.
Genetic sequencing indicated that the new variant was a mix of the coronavirus strains first detected in the United Kingdom and India, said Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long.
The minister said the new variant was particularly contagious via air and viral cultures have revealed it replicates extremely quickly, the newspaper reported.
The new variant is very dangerous,” Long said in a statement.
The Health Ministry didn’t return a Saturday afternoon request for comment.
Scientists said further study was needed to determine the effect of a variant in “real-world settings.”
“A lot of different mutations happen as the virus is transmitted and most of them are not of clinical significance,” said Todd Pollack, a Hanoi-based infectious disease expert for Harvard Medical School. “Just because they say [the new variant] has features of one and the other … doesn’t mean they got together in one patient and spit out some combined hybrid ‘supervirus.’ ”
Vietnam, which has reported around 6,400 coronavirus infections and 47 deaths, has been one of the world’s coronavirus containment success stories. A well-run public healthcare system, quarantine camps operated by the military and strict, targeted lockdowns kept case numbers low until late April when a spike in infections began.
There were seven known coronavirus variants in Vietnam before Long’s announcement, according to Reuters.
Law Student, School of Law, Quaid-I-Azam University, Islamabad