SULAIMANI (ESTA) — Vietnam said on Saturday it had detected a new variant of COVID-19, a mix of the Indian and UK coronavirus variants that spreads quickly by air.
“After running gene sequencing on newly detected patients, we have discovered a new variant that is a mix of India and UK ones,” Vietnam health ministry Nguyen Thanh Long said, according to Reuters.
He further said it was “an Indian variant with mutations that originally belong to the UK variant,” Reuters reported.
Vietnam had previously reported seven virus variants: B.1.222, B.1.619, D614G, B.1.1.7 (the UK variant), B.1.351, A.23.1 and B.1.617.2 (the Indian variant), Reuters said.
Long said laboratory cultures of the new variant, which is much more transmissible than the previously known types, revealed that the virus replicated itself very quickly, online newspaper VnExpress cited him as saying.
The Southeast Asian country has registered 6,396 coronavirus cases so far, with 47 deaths.
