The Vietnamese Ministry of Health confirmed 14 more COVID-19 cases, including four local infections, on Friday afternoon.

Two of the four community cases are natives of northern Ha Nam Province and have been admitted to Ha Nam General Hospital while the two others are workers at Bac Thang Long Industrial Park in Hanoi and being treated at the National Hospital for Tropical Diseases.

All of them were linked to patient No. 2,899.

These new cases took the total number of community transmissions in Vietnam to 1,584, of which 924 were detected after January 26.

The other patients registered on Friday afternoon included eight Vietnamese returning from Germany, the Philippines, Indonesia, one arrival at Moc Bai border gate in the southern province of Tay Ninh, and one Indian national, said the ministry.

Vietnam has registered 2,928 COVID-19 patients, with 2,516 recoveries and 35 virus-related deaths.

Most of the deceased patients had suffered critical pre-existing conditions.

The health ministry added in Friday afternoon’s announcement that the result following genetic sequencing of four Indian COVID-19 patients’ samples in Vietnam by the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology showed that they were infected with a coronavirus variant believed to be behind a devastating surge of the virus in India.

One Vietnamese citizen working at the hotel where this group of four were quarantined also caught the pathogen from them.