KONTAN.CO.ID – HANOI. Vietnam managed to contain the coronavirus for the most part in the last year. However, since April this year it has been dealing with a major COVID-19 outbreak in Ho Chi Minh City, driven by the Delta variant.
Nearly all of the 370,000 COVID-19 cases have been detected since May and daily infections jumped above 10,000, for the first time this month. That burdened hospitals in southern Vietnam and increased deaths.
Vietnam reported 11,575 coronavirus infections and 318 deaths from Covid-19 as of Thursday (26/8). Most cases were detected in Ho Chi Minh and Binh Duong Province, according to Vietnam’s Ministry of Health.
In fact, Vietnam has imposed a strict lockdown and mobilized troops to restrict movement in Ho Chi Minh, an elimination strategy also adopted by Australia with limited success so far.
“When the number of cases becomes very high and possibly due to the Delta variant, the strict lockdown becomes significantly less effective and makes tracking contracts very difficult,” Roger Lord, lecturer in medical sciences at Australian Catholic University, told the BBC. Reuters.
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Vietnam has only vaccinated full or two doses for only 2% of its 98 million population, including the lowest in Asia, because it opted for a containment policy and was in no rush to get a vaccine.
Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh on Tuesday (24/8) sent a letter to the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO) urging the COVAX vaccine sharing program to prioritize Vietnam “in the fastest way and in the largest possible volume”.
At a meeting with Chinh on Tuesday, China’s ambassador said he would donate 2 million doses of the vaccine, just a day before US Vice President Kamala Harris announced plans to offer 1 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.
“This is an excellent example of a country left behind when all the rich countries in the world take the vaccine first,” Dale Fisher, an infectious disease specialist at National University Hospital, Singapore, told Reuters.
“These losses will only be exacerbated as the same countries implement a third dose of prevention, while countries like Vietnam struggle with single-digit vaccine rates,” he said.
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