Vietnam's Health Ministry announced Saturday that a new variant of the coronavirus, with components of the UK and Indian strains, has been discovered in the country, causing a rapidly spreading outbreak, the Washington Post reports.
"The new variant is very dangerous," said Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long. Vietnam has been a success story in fighting the coronavirus, with only 6,700 cases and 47 deaths in a country of nearly 100 million people, even though just 0.1% of the population has been vaccinated.
Recently, outbreaks have been found in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, accounting for about 60% of the overall cases in the country. The nation has instituted quarantine camps for those infected as well as strictly-enforced lockdowns in places where outbreaks pop up.
"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.' "