Hanoi: Authorities in Vietnam have detected a new coronavirus variant that is a hybrid of strains found in India and the United Kingdom, an official said.
Nguyen Thanh Long, the Vietnamese health minister, told a government meeting on Saturday that scientists found the new variant after examining the genetic makeup of the virus that had infected some recent patients.
“That the new one is an Indian variant with mutations that originally belong to the UK variant is very dangerous,” he said.
Lab tests suggest the new strain might spread more easily than other versions of the virus, the minister said, adding that Vietnam would soon publish genome data of the newly identified variant.
After successfully containing the virus for most of last year, Vietnam 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.
The Southeast Asian country had previously detected seven virus variants: B.1.222, B.1.619, D614G, B.1.1.7 – the variant first found in UK, B.1.351, A.23.1 and B.1.617.2 – the one detected in India.
