Last Saturday, Vietnam's authorities announced that a highly infectious novel COVID-19 strain, a mix between Indian and UK varieties, is to blame for the disease's rapid spread across the country.

Until recently, Vietnam was thought to have avoided the global epidemic, as did other Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia and Thailand, which are now seeing significant outbreaks as well.

Vietnam's declaration emphasizes the fact that no country is immune to the virus's widespread recurrence. Because governments around the world have repeatedly prioritized corporate profit over public health and lives, new, more transmissible, and fatal mutations have been able to emerge, which may not be adequately limited by existing vaccines.

The rush to meet the demands of big business by lifting public health restrictions and fully reopening workplaces ahead of schedule, combined with insufficient vaccination programs and quarantine facilities, has created the conditions for millions of more people to die or suffer serious illness in the coming months.

The new hybrid strain brings the total number of strains operating in Vietnam to eight, according to Vietnam's Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long, who spoke at an online media conference on Saturday. B.1.222, B.1.619, D614G, B.1.1.7—the first variant identified in the UK—B.1.351, A.23.1, and B.1.617.2—the variant discovered in India—were the preceding seven.

Long added that in previous epidemics, the virus traveled swiftly through the air, especially in small, poorly ventilated rooms. He described the new variation as "very dangerous." The virus multiplied swiftly in laboratory conditions, which could explain why so many new cases occurred in such a short amount of time in 30 of the country's 63 towns and provinces.

According to Johns Hopkins University, more than half of the 6,396 COVID-19 cases recorded in Vietnam since the pandemic began had been discovered in the last month. There have been 47 deaths thus far, with 12 of them occurring in May.

Workers in the manufacturing industry are the hardest hit. The majority of the new transmissions were discovered in Bac Ninh and Bac Giang, two regions with significant industrial zones where hundreds of thousands of people work for large corporations like Samsung, Canon, and Luxshare, an Apple component partner. One company in Bac Giang discovered that one-fifth of its 4,800 employees were infected with the virus.

The city administration in Ho Chi Minh City, the country's largest metropolis with a population of 13 million, is now preparing to test all people, with a goal of 100,000 tests each day, although this will take weeks.

Since then, the Vietnamese government has issued a statewide ban on all religious ceremonies while maintaining factory operations. Large gatherings have been outlawed in major cities, and public parks and non-essential enterprises, such as restaurants, bars, clubs, and spas, have been shuttered.

Vietnam, like many other developing countries, is having difficulty obtaining vaccines from multinational pharmaceutical companies. Only 1 million of the country's 96 million people have received AstraZeneca vaccines so far. It signed a contract with Pfizer last week for 30 million pills, which will be delivered in the third and fourth quarters of this year.

The government is also in discussion with Moderna about securing 10 million vaccination shots under the World Health Organization's COVAX cost-sharing program. It is also in talks with Russia to produce the Sputnik V vaccine and is developing its own vaccine.

In Malaysia, an even greater calamity is already started. Last year, it escaped the worst of the epidemic, but it was attacked by a second wave in January-February and has been slammed by more infectious variations in the last month. More than 1,200 deaths were documented in May alone, compared to 471 for the entire year of 2020.

Its authorities recorded 9,020 new cases on Saturday, the fifth consecutive day of record infections, bringing the total number of cases to more than 550,000. In Malaysia, the number of daily new confirmed cases per million people had surpassed that of India a month ago.

The number of daily fatalities has also increased, reaching a new high of 98 on May 29, bringing the total to nearly 2,800. Patients in intensive care and on ventilators have reached all-time highs.

Some hospitals in Malaysia's worst-affected locations, according to media reports, have run out of mortuary space. At least two have brought in chilled cargo containers to store COVID-19 sufferers' bodies.

Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin, who had previously opposed calls for a national lockdown, claiming that the country could not afford it, made a partial U-turn last Friday, ordering the closure of “non-essential” enterprises for at least two weeks, beginning June 1. The government will send 70,000 troops to impose the lockdown as a show of power.

Muhyiddin has declared a state of emergency in Malaysia since January, ostensibly to halt the spread of the virus, suspending parliament and effectively halting political activity. The inoculation program, on the other hand, has been reluctant to take hold. By last Thursday, about 1.7 million of the country's 32 million residents had received at least one dosage of the vaccine.

Despite the mounting threat, millions of workers in Malaysia's manufacturing sector will be kept on the job during the lockdown, with 60 percent labor capacity.

A list of "vital services" includes factories that manufacture electrical and electronic goods, oil, gas, and petrochemicals, chemical products, and personal protective equipment, such as rubber gloves. Food and beverages, aerospace, packaging and printing, health and medical care, personal care and cleaning products, banking, palm oil, and rubber plantations, agriculture, fisheries, and cattle are also on the list.

People in Thailand's neighboring country are facing a devastating third wave, with the highest concentrations in factories, migrant worker construction camps, densely crowded slums, and jails. More than 2,000 instances were discovered in a single factory in Phetchaburi, southwest of Bangkok, with migrant workers from Myanmar accounting for more than half of the cases.

For the majority of last year, Thailand was portrayed as a coronavirus success story, with just under 7,000 cases and 60 deaths as the year came to a conclusion. However, more than 150,000 instances have been reported in the country since April 1.

Last Sunday, the military-backed administration announced 4,528 additional COVID-19 cases and 24 fatalities, bringing the national death toll to 1,012.

According to health officials, there are currently roughly 46,000 persons infected with the coronavirus, with 400 of them on ventilators. Hospitals are bursting at the seams. Kunlasub Watthanaphol, a well-known video gamer, died on April 23 after repeatedly asking unsuccessfully for aid via the government's hotlines and social media.

The jails are extremely overcrowded, with a population of approximately 307,000 inmates—three times the statutory capacity. On May 17, convicts accounted for more than 70% of the 9,635 new cases reported across the country that day. In one Chiang Mai prison, 61 percent of detainees tested positive for HIV.

The true scope of the prison disaster was discovered only after many student activists arrested for participating in anti-government protests last year and charged with insulting the king disclosed they had tested positive for the virus.

Authorities have finally set certain limitations. Schools, entertainment venues, bars, cinemas, gyms, pools, and parks in Bangkok have been shuttered, while office workers have been encouraged to work from home.

Only roughly 2 million people in Thailand's 66 million population have received the first immunization dose, and 1 million have received both shots.

Inoculation rates are similar in Indonesia, the region's most populous country, where infections are on the rise as well, with hospitalizations in isolation beds rising 14.2 percent to 23,488, between May 20 and May 26.

According to Our World in Data, vaccination rates in Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia were less than half of those in India, which remains the epicenter of the global COVID-19 tragedy as of last Friday.

The virus's mutations and spread across Southeast Asia highlight the global nature of the public health emergency, as well as the need for workers around the world to unite their struggles across national borders and seize control from the ruling capitalist classes, who have allowed the disaster to worsen globally.