[Variant is a mix of coronavirus
strains first detected in the United Kingdom and India, country’s health
minister says]
By Katerina Ang
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, according to the VnExpress newspaper.
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.’ ”
There were seven known coronavirus
variants in Vietnam before Long’s announcement, according to Reuters.
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 health-care system, quarantine camps operated by the military
and strict, targeted lockdowns kept case numbers low until late April, when a
spike in infections began.
Many of the recent infections were
detected in two industrialized provinces in northern Vietnam, where factory
employees often work in proximity. Plants there that manufacture for such
global brands as Apple have implemented social distancing measures, Reuters reported. Such factories are key to Vietnam’s
export sector, which has boomed amid trade tensions between the United States
and China.
Restrictions are also in place in
Hanoi, the capital, and Ho Chi Minh City, the country’s economic hub.
Singapore and Taiwan, which had effectively eliminated transmission of
the coronavirus at the start of the year, recently reintroduced curbs as
infections return.
Many countries that managed the
pandemic with “non-pharmaceutical interventions are finding that more
transmissible variants are more difficult to control with these measures,”
Pollack said. “This is the biggest challenge that [Vietnam is] facing since
covid-19 came onto the scene.”
Vietnam is operating one of the
slower inoculation programs in the world, with fewer than 0.1 percent of its
103 million residents having been fully vaccinated as of Friday. It has
approved the Oxford-AstraZeneca and Sputnik V shots and recently signed a deal
to buy more than 30 million Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine doses. Vietnam is also
developing its own Nanocovax vaccine, whose final-stage trials are set for completion in the second half of the year.
Hanoi has a rocky relationship with
Beijing and, unlike many other middle income nations, it has not approved the
use of Chinese-developed vaccines
