More from Vietnam:

New COVID-19 hybrid strain found in Vietnam
29/05/21 16:10
HANOI, May 29 (Xinhua) -- Vietnam has detected a new hybrid COVID-19 strain between the variants first identified in Britain and India, according to local media VnExpress on Saturday.

According to the Minister of Health Nguyen Thanh Long, the hybrid strain could spread very fast in the air, and the Vietnamese health ministry will announce this new strain on the world gene map.

The two mutated strains first identified in Britain and India are currently the most common variants among the new COVID-19 cases in Vietnam in the ongoing infection wave.

Vietnam reported 87 new COVID-19 cases from 6:00 p.m. local time Friday to 6 a.m. Saturday, raising the total confirmed cases in the country to 6,657, according to its Ministry of Health.

The new cases, which are all community transmissions, include 57 in the northern epidemic hotspot Bac Giang province, 27 in the nearby northern Bac Ninh province, and one in the Vietnamese capital Hanoi, among others.
FRESH NEWS

Southeast Asia Had COVID-19 Under Control. What Went Wrong?
Mutant viruses, rich Chinese tourists, and a military government no one trusts are among the reasons cases are surging.
By Nathan Thompson, an FP contributor based in Southeast Asia.
May 26, 2021, 10:41 AM

As the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc around the world, life in Southeast Asia stayed normal. Worshippers thronged Buddhist temples, taxis and tuk-tuks jostled at traffic lights, and revelers crooned in late-night karaoke bars.

In February, however, disaster struck. Massive outbreaks have forced Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos into ongoing lockdowns.

Given the huge numbers of business and leisure travelers to Southeast Asia, it’s remarkable that the region managed to avoid a mass COVID-19 outbreak for as long as it did. It’s uncertain exactly how. People speculate it was due to swift border closures in early 2020, the hot, humid climate, and the fact that everyone masked up.

But through the cracks, the virus got in. On Feb. 7 in Cambodia, four Chinese nationals arrived in the capital of Phnom Penh from Dubai in a private jet, according to the local press. They went straight to the fancy Sokha Hotel for what were supposed to be 14 days of quarantine. But only a day after their arrival, on Feb. 8, they escaped the hotel by bribing at least one security guard. Two of the Chinese travelers tested positive for COVID-19; one carried the highly contagious British variant of the virus. The foursome partied in luxurious apartments and went clubbing.

Before February, daily new COVID-19 infections in Cambodia rarely surpassed 10 a day. On April 10 alone, the country registered 477 new cases. The government responded with a strict lockdown, including a law punishing violators of coronavirus-related rules with up to 20 years in prison. But given the fact that tens of thousands of a low-paid workers live in tiny apartments and shanties throughout Phnom Penh and other cities, social distancing is impossible. And the millions of people who live hand to mouth can’t afford to stay at home.

For Cambodia and much of the region, therefore, the only solution is mass vaccination. Cambodia has been proactive in procuring and administering vaccines. Since the first crates of AstraZeneca’s vaccine arrived on March 2, about 22 percent of Cambodia’s 10 million adults have received at least one dose of vaccine, with 15 percent fully vaccinated, according to one estimate. China has also provided over a million doses of its Sinopharm vaccine. As for the four travelers suspected of starting this outbreak, their location is unknown.

Thailand, Cambodia’s wealthier neighbor, is lagging behind. Only 2 percent of its 69 million people have been fully vaccinated, and confidence in the government has hit rock bottom. “The rollout has been very slow,” said Panchana Vatanasathien, the chairperson of the Khao Yai Tourism Association and founder of Food for Fighters, which has helped Bangkok’s poorest residents through the epidemic. “The government lies [about the vaccine] rollout every day, and people everywhere are asking, ‘Where is my vaccine?’”

As official cases in Thailand tripled through April and May, Laos—which shares a long land border with Thailand—was looking very vulnerable. It only took one small incident with parallels to what happened in Cambodia to seed a new outbreak. It came when two Thai men and a Lao woman illegally crossed the Mekong River marking the border to meet another Lao woman, with whom they attended Lao New Year celebrations. They visited several bars, a nightclub, a temple, and a massage parlor, according to local press. The three travelers from Thailand were treated for COVID-19 after their return and are facing charges. The Lao woman who helped them cross the river also contracted the virus; she was arrested after she recovered.
Full article: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/05/26/so ... -cambodia/

Explaining How Super-Spreading Exploded in India:

Kumbh Mela: how a superspreader festival seeded Covid across India
From across India, millions of Hindu pilgrims came to take a ritual dip in the Ganges, then returned home carrying Covid-19. Here are their stories
by Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Aakash Hassan in Delhi
Last modified on Sun 30 May 2021 10.47 BST

On 12 April, as India registered another 169,000 new Covid-19 cases to overtake Brazil as the second-worst hit country, three million people gathered on the shores of the Ganges.

They were there, in the ancient city of Haridwar in the state of Uttarakhand, to take a ritual dip in the holy river. The bodies, squashed together in a pack of devotion and religious fervour, paid no visible heed to Covid protocols.

This was one of the holiest days of the Kumbh Mela, a festival that has become a highlight of the Hindu religious calendar and is known for drawing millions of pilgrims, seers, priests and tourists.

In the weeks beforehand, as a deadly coronavirus second wave began engulfing India, anxious calls to cancel the festival were rebuffed by the state and central government, which are both ruled by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP). On 21 March, a full page newspaper advert featuring the prime minister, Narendra Modi, invited devotees to the festival, assuring them it was “clean” and “safe”.

But as festivities got into full swing in March, testing capacity was criticised as inadequate. Masks, though mandatory, were largely absent. The Uttarakhand BJP chief minister, Tirath Singh Rawat, who had earlier told devotees that “faith in God will overcome the fear of the virus”, was among the millions pictured taking part in the rituals wearing no face covering. Police overseeing the event said that were they to enforce social distancing, “a stampede-like situation may arise”.

By 15 April, more than 2,000 festivalgoers had already tested positive for Covid-19. Two days later, Modi backtracked and called for the Kumbh Mela to be “symbolic”, but it was too late. By the time the festival ended, on 28 April, more than 9 million people had attended.

The true toll of the Kumbh Mela will never be known, due in part to an alleged effort to stop collecting data. Thousands of pilgrims returned home without having been tested or quarantined and without any track of them kept by the government.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... ross-india

Southeast Asian states pay price for virus complacency


During much of the first year of COVID-19, Southeast Asia seemed one of the few bright spots in the world. Vietnam, a lower-middle income country that had learned from its experience with SARS, had one of the lowest case and death rates in the world. Thailand, Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia and even poorer countries in the region such as Laos and Cambodia mostly kept the virus at bay, even as wealthier states in Europe, North America and Latin America suffered millions of cases and hundreds of thousands of deaths.

To be sure, Indonesia and the Philippines struggled, but the region’s overall low rates even made some scientists question whether people in mainland Southeast Asia enjoyed some natural immunity to the novel coronavirus.

More recently, many Southeast Asian states have experienced troublingly sharp new surges in cases, and some countries could wind up as COVID-19 disasters nearly on a scale with that of India. Thailand, which at points last year had no domestically transmitted COVID-19 cases, now is averaging around 4,000 new cases a day, and some of its hospitals are running out of ventilators and intensive care unit beds.

Cambodia, which had few cases in 2020, is now averaging around 500 cases a day, while Malaysia is actually averaging as many new cases, per capita, as India, where COVID-19 is killing tens of thousands of people, and is struggling to set up mobile intensive care units.


https://archive.is/TpTCf


I've left an archived link to full article above as it might be paywalled.- The Japan Times

Vietnam Covid News continued:
Vietnam's new COVID-19 hybrid variant replicating quickly
ANI
02 Jun 2021, 12:18 GMT+10

Hanoi [Vietnam], June 2 (ANI): Vietnam's 'very dangerous' new COVID-19 hybrid variant may be fuelling its worst outbreak so far as it is replicating quickly.

On Saturday, the Vietnamese authorities revealed they had discovered a "very dangerous" new coronavirus variant that combined mutations first found in India and the UK, and which spreads quickly by air, reported The Telegraph.

Vietnam's plight follows a now familiar pattern of COVID-19 surges across Asia - most alarmingly in countries like Singapore, Laos, Thailand and Taiwan that were praised for beating the virus in 2020, only to be caught out by a global vaccine shortage as new variants ricocheted back from coronavirus hotspots.

Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long said Vietnam would soon publish genome data of the newly identified variant, which he said was more transmissible than the previously known types, reported UK-based news agency.

He said laboratory cultures of the new variant showed the virus replicated itself very quickly, possibly explaining why so many new cases had appeared in different parts of the country in a short period of time.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation (WHO) is investigating reports of a mutation that spreads extremely quickly - but the country still isn't on the UK's red list, reported The Telegraph.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has identified four variants of concern - emerging from the UK, India, South Africa and Brazil - is currently investigating Vietnam's findings.

Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO Technical Lead for COVID-19, said currently the variant detected in Vietnam was understood to be the B.1.617.2 variant, possibly with an additional mutation, but that more information would be provided when it was received.
https://www.thecambodianews.net/news/26 ... ng-quickly

Meanwhile, the world's most populous city confirmed today, they will be hosting the Olympics this year.
It is said, debating a subject on the side you are actually against is a powerful brain exercise to ward off memory loss, dementia, Alzheimer's, and I could probably come up with a few arguments "For", and I have always thought of the Japanese as cluey, but cramming 100M+ people into Tokyo to see how high and fast humans can go could undo some scientists' hard work and introduce more hybrids. IMO. Bring on the mice, early.

When there's a small outbreak then a bigger outbreak doesn't matter what county they seem to be able to find person zero.
But not in china the best scientist in the world couldn't find it