Coronavirus: Vietnam detects new ‘hybrid’ UK-India variant; Malaysia reports record daily increase with 9,020 new cases
- Laboratory cultures of the more-transmissible new variant revealed that it is able to replicate itself very quickly, according to reports
- Meanwhile, Malaysia reported the fifth straight day of record new infections and fresh cases in India fell to their lowest level in more than six weeks
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.
“Vietnam has uncovered a new Covid-19 variant combining characteristics of the two existing variants first found in India and the UK,” Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long said, describing it as a hybrid of the two known variants.
“That the new one is an Indian variant with mutations that originally belong to the UK variant is very dangerous,” he told a government meeting.
Long said Vietnam would soon publish genome data of the newly identified variant, which he said was more transmissible than the previously known types.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has identified four variants of SARS-CoV-2 of global concern. These include variants that emerged first in India, Britain, South Africa and Brazil.