Next 10 days ‘critical’ in COVID-19 fight, says Vietnam PM
Vietnam’s Prime Minister said on Wednesday (Aug 12) that the next 10 days would be critical in the country’s fight against a new coronavirus outbreak, which resurfaced late last month after three months of no domestic cases.
Vietnam was lauded for suppressing an earlier contagion through aggressive testing, contact tracing and quarantining, but it is now racing to control infections in multiple locations linked to the popular holiday city of Danang, where a new outbreak was detected on Jul 25.
“Note that the period from this week to the middle of next week is critical,” Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said on Wednesday, according to a government statement.
“Which measures should we continue to implement to win against the virus? Which lessons have we learnt from this current outbreak?” said Phuc.
Vietnam reported 17 new COVID-19 infections on Wednesday, raising the number of cases in the country to 880, with 17 deaths. All fatalities stemmed from the new outbreak.
One of the new infections was in the capital of Hanoi and had no clear link to Danang, the health ministry said, in a development that could complicate efforts to track and control the spread.The majority of recent cases were in Danang, a town of 1.1 million, where broad social distancing measures and a city-wide lockdown were extended indefinitely on Tuesday.
A sports stadium converted into a 1,000-bed field hospital received its first COVID-19 patients on Wednesday, many of them from three urban hospitals at the centre of Danang’s outbreak.
Phuc warned last Friday that the risk of a wider spread was “very high” and called for a more determined containment fight.
On Wednesday, he characterised actions taken by the authorities to combat the current, third wave of infections as better than previous outbreaks.
People in Vietnam have also reacted more calmly, despite the sudden re-emergence of the virus, Phuc said.
He previously said that early August would be the decisive time within which to stop the virus spreading in Vietnam on a large scale.
Chanel News Asia with Reuters – August 12, 2020