The total number of people infected with COVID-19 in Vietnam since the beginning of the pandemic is about to reach 360,000, according to a bulletin of the Ministry of Health on August 23. The number of deaths since the beginning of the epidemic is 8,666 people.
On the same day, Vietnam’s state-controlled media reported that armed soldiers began to be deployed in HCM City to enforce the directive which requires “people do not leave their homes.”
The Ministry of Health said that in just one week, there were 74,728 new infections, when the average number of infections per day in Vietnam was above 10,000 people, bringing the number of infected people from the beginning of the epidemic to 358,456 cases now.
Particularly from 6 pm on August 22 to 6:30 pm on August 23, the country recorded 10,280 new infections and 389 deaths. In which, HCM City, the epicenter of the epidemic in the past 4 months, still accounts for the most, with 4,251 infections and 340 deaths.
The day with a record high number of new infections was August 21, with 13,417 cases, reports from the Ministry of Health said.
In the previous phase of the pandemic, which lasted for more than a year in Vietnam until April 27, the country recorded just over 4,000 infections and several dozen deaths. But for the last nearly 4 months, the delta mutation has caused a strong outbreak of the pandemic in the country, especially in HCM City and the southern provinces, causing more than 354,000 infections and more than 8,600 deaths.
Against such a backdrop, the authorities are speeding up vaccination, with nearly 300,000 doses being injected on August 22 alone.
To date, the Ministry of Health said that a total of more than 15.5 million people have received 1 injection, and more than 1.8 million people have received 2nd dose. However, this number is considered still low compared to the Southeast Asian region when the number of people fully vaccinated against COVID accounted for only 1.8% of the population of 98 million people.
In order to enforce the strictest social distancing measures, including the directive “people do not leave their homes” in the epicenter of the epidemic HCM City, the government sent thousands of soldiers with guns to guard the city’s neighborhoods of Vietnam’s largest city since August 23, local news reports said.
Previously, on August 21, the HCM City government proposed that Military Region 7 “support more than 6,000 soldiers” to fight the epidemic.
This city began to suffer from many restrictions due to the order to stay in place since the beginning of July, and the level of the ban gradually increased because the number of infections and deaths did not decrease.
On the afternoon of August 22, the People’s Committee of the city issued an “urgent directive” on strengthening social distancing and epidemic prevention and control to achieve the goal of “controlling the COVID-19 epidemic situation in the locality before September 15, 2021.”
With the directive, the HCM City government said that the people were “the service center“- the “subject in the prevention and control of the epidemic” and “required people not to leave the house, wherever anyone is, stay there,“ according to local press reports.
The government also said it would “do a good job of taking care of social security” including “measures to support innkeepers such as exempting and reducing electricity and water bills” and “preparing 2 million social security bags, ensuring the principle of not forgetting difficult cases” in addition to “preparing nutritious meals” to provide COVID-19 patients with difficult circumstances, the domestic media said.
Thoibao.de (Translated)
