Vietnam health minister Nguyen Thanh Long has said the country has detected a new variant of the coronavirus, a mix of the Indian and UK Covid-19 variants that spread quickly by air, online newspaper VnExpress reported.

“After running gene sequencing on newly detected patients, we have discovered a new variant that is a mix of India and UK ones,” Nguyen Thanh Long was quoted as saying.

“More specifically, it is an Indian variant with mutations that originally belong to the UK variant,” he said. VnExpress quoted Long as saying Vietnam would announce the newly discovered variant to the world soon.