JAKARTA - Vietnam's Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long said on Saturday that his country had detected a new variant of the coronavirus, a mixture of the Indian and British variants of COVID-19 that spread rapidly through the air, the online newspaper VnExpress reported. After successfully containing the coronavirus for most of last year, Vietnam is now battling a faster-spreading outbreak. Nearly 3,600 people have been infected in 31 of 63 cities and provinces since the end of April, accounting for more than half of the country's total infections. Sequencing the gene in the newly detected patient, we have found a new variant which is a mixture of the Indian and British variants," said Nguyen Thanh Long.
More specifically, it was an Indian variant with a mutation that originally belonged to the British variant, he said. VnExpress quoted Long as saying Vietnam will soon announce the newly discovered variant to the world. Vietnam has previously reported seven virus variants: B.1.222, B.1.619, D614G, B.1.1.7 (English variant), B.1.351, A. 23.1 and B.1.617.2 (Indian variant). Laboratory culturing results of the new variant, which is much more transmissible than previously known strains, revealed that the virus replicates itself very rapidly, explaining why so many new cases have emerged in the area. The Southeast Asian country has so far registered 6,396 cases of the coronavirus, with 47 deaths.
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