KUALA LUMPUR: The Health Ministry has identified 515 new cases of the Covid-19 Delta variant in the last week, from Nov 25.
Health director-general Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said Universiti Malaysia Sarawak's Institute of Health and Community Medicine (IHCM-Unimas) has identified 415 new cases of the Variant of Concern (VOC) Delta (B.1.617.2).
He said the same variant had also been reported by three other research institutes — Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia's Medical Molecular Biology Institute (UMBI-UKM), Malaysia Genome & Vaccine Institute (MGI) and Tropical Infectious Diseases Research & Education Centre (TIDREC), confirming the Covid-19 spike protein mutation were all from the same Delta (B.1.617.2) variant.
"UMBI-UKM has identified 46 new cases, MGI 44 cases and TIDREC 10 new cases between Nov 25 and today," he said.
Dr Noor Hisham said this pushed the nation's cumulative number of variants for SARS-CoV-2 for VOC and Variant of Interest (VOI) to 4,692 cases.
"Of the total cases detected, 4,672 of them were VOC while 20 cases were VOI. There were 4,432 VOC of the Delta variant cases; 226 Beta variant cases and 14 Alpha variant cases."
For VOI cases, Dr Noor Hisham said there were 13 cases of the Theta variant; four cases of the Kappa variant; and three cases of the Eta variant.
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