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Watch out folks: there's a lot of news circulating of a "new strain" of COVID called G614 found in southeast Asia. This is NOT A NEW STRAIN, but rather it is only new to that region.
This is because the east Asian cases early in the pandemic were the D614 strain -- the G614 mutation is the one that broke out in North America and Europe, and has taken over the vast majority of cases worldwide since about March.
The mutation does potentially pose some hurdles for vaccine development, as it may (or may not) have caused a lot of previous research into D614 to be useless against G614. But that isn't a certainty, and there is still a lot of work to be done before it's fully understood.
In any event, what the news SHOULD say is that the G614 strain has been found in Malaysia and the Philippines because the virus has officially gone all the way around the world and come back in a different form than it started in -- which is interesting, but not catastrophic.
Here's a pretty solid scientific breakdown that doesn't get too into the weeds with biochemistry: https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/what-the-d614g-mutation-means-for-covid-19-spread-fatality-treatment-and-vaccine-7dda1c066f0d
