Vietnam is now slowly lifting government restrictions after it had managed to report no new coronavirus infections for the past nine days. On Sunday, health officials confirmed that the confirmed cases in the country have remained at 270 and no new infections had been reported.
According to the country's Ministry of Health, the measures that were immediately taken by the government had been successful in mitigating the spread of the disease. The National Steering Committee for Covid-19 Prevention and Control revealed that it had also not received any new reports of COVID-19 cases from local communities in over a week.
Official data shows that 219 out of the 270 confirmed cases in the country have already managed to recover, while the rest are still being confined. The country also reports that it has recorded no fatalities due to the virus since the start of the outbreak. Health workers are currently monitoring over 30,000 people, who are currently being quarantined. More than 443 people are considered suspected cases and are awaiting test results.
Health experts in Vietnam claim that the country's successful mitigation of the spread of the virus was attributed to its quick response and decisive moves, which included the immediate restrictions of travel into the country. Unlike other Southeast Asian nations, Vietnam immediately placed tens of thousands of people into quarantine, which was followed by a ramp-up of its testing efforts. Authorities were quick to trace infected individuals and then tracked down anyone they might have been exposed to the virus.
Hanoi-based US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) official, Mathew Moore, stated that the fight against the virus in Vietnam was difficult but the government was able to implement them over and over again. Moore has been working with the Vietnam government and health officials to control the outbreak since January.
Vietnam was one of the first countries to take immediate action to control the spread of the pandemic when it started to spread in China back in January. When it got wind of the outbreak, the country ramped up the number of facilities that are able to test for the disease from just three in January to more than 112 laboratories by April. So far, health officials had conducted more than 213,000 tests on suspected individuals.
Given its number of confirmed cases, Vietnam currently has the highest ratio of tests to every confirmed case, which stands at around 791 tests for each case. Vietnam is then followed by Taiwan, which has a ratio of 140 tests for every confirmed case.
