Very glad my work trip to Vietnam got cancelled, since apparantly they have a new airborne variant that is a combination of the Indian and British variant. A commonwealth best of, so to say.
While I am also glad you are not in Vietnam, I do take their claims with a grain of salt - the UK mutation is less infectious than the Indian one, so gaining a "UK" mutation will not necessarily turn the Indian variant even worse.
With very little cases, no vaccination to speak of, few covid rules, and a dense population, there was little to no evolutionary pressure on the variants, so the "combined" variant may well become dominant without being inherently worse than the Indian or British one*.
Why am I so skeptical of these claims? Because the full might of UK's prime researchers (and they are among the world's best, with the most experience in covid lab tests and population spread modeling) still can't put a number behind how much more infective the Indian variant is than the UK one, and why that's the case. It just seems a bit implausible that Vietnam, with zero experience in covid research (due to a lack of covid cases so far) should have all these answers the second their variant pops up.
Finally, the "airborne" part sounds worse than it is: A spike protein mutation can't make the virus more or less airborne. Like UK researchers theorize (but don't know yet) about the Indian variant, the Vietnamese present as a fact that a higher viral load in the upper airways compared to vanilla covid means infected people exhale more virus with every breath, so it can infect people through aerosols more efficiently.
This may be even worse than the Indian one, but it might also turn out like the Danish Mink variant that looked scary at first glace but then fizzled out. Or it may come in somewhere in the middle - more infectious than UK covid, but less than Indian. We'll see. I refuse to worry before actual data comes in.
Also, second shot on the 9th. Can't wait.
*Imagine you have three people - one infected with UK covid, one with Indian covid, one with newly-fanged Vietnam covid. India covid guy goes home, infects his wife. UK covid guy goes to a restaurant, then home. Infects the waiter, a person he stood next to at the pissioir, and his wife. Vietnam variant guy goes to a night of partying, infects 20 people. In this scenario, both UK covid and Vietnam covid have an advantage before Indian covid since infection chains will he harder to trace and there are more spreaders for the variant from the get go. And this is what makes modeling spread even at the tens of thousands of Indian variant cases the British have so super complicated.
EDIT: In other news, despite the Indian variant having made it's way there, Israel reported a record low four(!) new covid infections yesterday, the lowest since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020. At least for their case, 50-something percent fully and 60 percent one-time vaccinated seems to be enough to drive covid to a halt. Since the UK predominantly uses AZ which has a slightly lower efficacy against transmission, they'll need approx. 75% vaccine coverage to achieve the same effect.