The Covid-19 pandemic never fails to amaze us with its unpredictable nature. While the second wave of the pandemic in India seems to be slowing down with less than 1.5 lakh cases being reported every day, a new variant of the coronavirus has been found in Vietnam.

Since the virus was first identified in January 2020, thousands of mutations have been detected, but the decision of the World Health Organisation to classify the new variant as a “variant of global concern” and the warning from the Vietnamese Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long that the new variant was more transmissible than the previously known ones and spreads faster by air, is sending chills down the spines of experts and the common people in north Bengal as in the rest of the country.

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According to experts in the region, the new variant, which is being referred to as the “Vietnamese variant,” is far more infectious and can cause more deaths in an unvaccinated population. A senior professor of the Department of Biotechnology, University of North Bengal, Dr Ranadhir Chakraborty, who was part of an international team which mapped a total of 7,170 genomes of the coronavirus till August 2020, said the new variant was a hybrid of strains found in India and the United Kingdom, which were already causing rapid infections across the globe and were mainly responsible for the devastating second wave in India.

“In the Indian double variant, which is being scientifically referred to as the B.1.617.2 variant, two mutations had taken place in the receptor binding domain, namely L452R and E484Q. In the UK variant, which is being scientifically referred to as the B.1.1.7 variant, there was one mutation in the receptor binding domain, namely N501Y. There were also two deletions, one of which was a deletion of the 144th amino acid in the N-Terminal domain, which is Tyrosine. The Vietnamese variant is actually the Indian variant, where this 144th amino acid, that is, the Tyrosine has suddenly got deleted, as in the UK variant,” he said.

As a result of the deletion, Dr Chakraborty said the infectivity of the virus had increased manifold and it could lead to more fatalities in unvaccinated people. “Vietnam had previously received widespread applause for its aggressive pandemic response, with mass quarantines and strict contact tracing helping it to keep infection rates relatively low. But the concentration of the new virus in the throat fluid increases so rapidly and spreads so strongly to the surrounding environment that the country is now struggling to deal with fresh outbreaks caused largely and presumably by the new variant across more than half of its territory,” he said.

The veteran microbiologist, who called for speeding up the ongoing vaccination drive in India, warned about the threat of the new variant as a majority of the country’s population was not vaccinated.

“The number of new Covid-19 cases in India may be declining steadily, but if the new variant strikes our country, the viral load in the air may shoot up rapidly, especially in the urban areas, where the density of population is very high and it is very difficult to maintain physical distance. The death toll may also rise. The only way forward is vaccination. If we’re not pushing for mass vaccination, it’s not safe to face the third wave that is bound to occur,” he said.