Vietnam has detected four cases of a COVID-19 variant believed to be behind a devastating surge of the virus in India, state media said Thursday.Separately, the country also reported its first community outbreak in weeks on Thursday.Vietnam has so far kept case numbers low – reporting 2,910 of them and 35 deaths – thanks to mass quarantines and extensive contact tracing.All four of those infected with the B.1.617 variant of COVID-19, which was first found in India, had recently travelled from

Fast-spreading coronavirus variants have ignited global concern over whether existing vaccines will be able to protect the world from a virus that is constantly mutating.Variants that have emerged in Britain, South Africa, Brazil and now India have all been the focus of fears of implications for the COVID-19 pandemic. Here's what we know.How Many Variants?Viruses continually mutate as tiny errors are introduced each time they replicate and cause new variants to appear.

Dr Anthony Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser, has said countries have failed to unite to provide an adequate global response to prevent the “tragic” coronavirus outbreak from overwhelming India, and singled out wealthier nations for failing to provide equitable access to healthcare around the world.Fauci said the situation in India had highlighted global inequality.“The only way that you’re going to adequately respond to a global pandemic is by having a global response, and a glo

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has raised its growth forecast for developing Asia this year on the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines and the strength of global export demand, but warned that resurgent virus outbreaks threatened the recovery.China and India are expected to lead the rebound across the vast region stretching from the Cook Islands in the Pacific to Kazakhstan in Central Asia, the lender said Wednesday. The Philippines-based ADB predicted growth of 7.3 percent, compared with

Is there one pandemic, or two? That was a question being asked a year ago, when wealthy countries accounting for only 15 percent of the global population had 80 percent of the COVID deaths. Could it be that the rich world was more vulnerable, somehow, because its populations were older, or more individualistic, or had forgotten to be scared of infectious disease?Even then, some were warning that the worst was yet to come, once the disease took hold in poorer countries.

Something has gone horribly wrong in India. Yesterday, the country reported 346,786 new cases of COVID-19 for the previous 24 hours, with 2,624 deaths – the world’s highest daily toll since the pandemic began last year. Overall, nearly 190,000 people have died from COVID in the country, while more than 16.6 million have been infected.The new outbreak in India is so severe that hospitals are running out of oxygen and beds, and many people who have been taken ill are being turned away.

The United States (US) has pledged to cut carbon emissions by 50-52 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2030.This new target, which was unveiled at a virtual summit of 40 global leaders, essentially doubles their previous promise.But the leaders of India and China, two of the world's biggest emitters, made no new commitments."Scientists tell us that this is the decisive decade – this is the decade we must make decisions that will avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis,

With India’s daily tally of COVID-19 infections surging by records, public health experts worry that a new – possibly more virulent – coronavirus variant could be racing through the crowded nation of more than 1.3 billion people.The new variant, which has a so-called double mutation, is thought to be fuelling India’s deadlier new wave of cases that has made it the world’s second worst-hit country, surpassing Brazil again, and has already begun to overwhelm its hospitals and

Under the Paris Agreement on climate, nearly every country will have to drastically reduce their carbon emissions, and they were supposed to submit renewed plans to do so by the end of 2020.The first raft of "nationally determined contributions" (NDCs) submitted in 2015 would put Earth on course to be at least three degrees Celsius (C) hotter than pre-industrial times, a far cry from the Paris temperature cap goal of keeping warming "well below" two degrees C.Under the dea

In early March, India's health minister Harsh Vardhan declared the country was "in the endgame" of the COVID-19 pandemic.Mr Vardhan also lauded Prime Minister Narendra Modi's leadership as an "example to the world in international co-operation". From January onwards, India had begun shipping doses to foreign countries as part of its much-vaunted "vaccine diplomacy".Mr Vardhan's unbridled optimism was based on a sharp drop in reported infections.