This new SARS-CoV2 variant has changes similar to those of the B.1.1.7 and B.1.617.2 variants originally found in the U.K. and India, respectively.
Just keep mutating. Just keep mutating. That what the Covid-19 coronavirus is gonna do. And over time that’s gonna keep resulting in more and more versions of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV2), otherwise known as variants. Case in point, the country of Vietnam appears to have found yet another variant. Writing for The Guardian, Agence France-Presse quoted Nguyen Thanh Long, Vietnam’s Health Minister, as saying, “We have discovered a new hybrid variant from the Indian and the UK strains.” The word “hybrid” may conjure up images of the B.1.1.7 variant (first found in the U.K.) and the B.1.617.2 variant (first found in India) finding each other on Tinder, swiping right with their spike proteins, and then meeting up in a seedy motel. There they may put on Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On,” while spiking the protein so to speak, resulting in little love child viruses, right? Uh, not exactly. Instead, as Thu Anh reported for the VNExpress International, this new SARS-CoV2 variant has a change, a Y144 deletion on its spike protein, that’s similar to what’s been found with the B.1.1.7 and B.1.617.2 variants. Both the B.1.1.7 and B.1.617.2 variants seem to be more transmissible than the original version of the virus that first led to the pandemic. Therefore, it’s not surprising that this new variant is probably more transmissible as well.
