Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh of Vietnam ordered COVID-19 tests for all of its capital city after the government mobilized soldiers to distribute food in the country's commercial center in the face of new rigid measures to curb a growing outbreak of the virus.
After managing to keep the disease at bay for much of 2020, Vietnam has registered a total of 348,000 cases and at least 8,277 deaths, reports said Monday.
Most of those infections have been tallied in Ho Chi Minh City and its surrounding industrial provinces, where the highly contagious Delta variant has sent numbers increasing since late April.
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam's biggest metropolis, started a strict lockdown Monday, a day before U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris arrives in the nation on an official state visit.
Uncertainty swept across HCMC through the weekend, sparked by conflicting information from officials about food shopping prohibitions. Restrictions on shopping are expected to be implemented Monday until Sept 6, authorities said.
HCMC and Vietnam's entire southern region have been placed in lockdown since July, when the Delta variant began to spread. Public gatherings have been prohibited, non-essential businesses are ordered shut, and locals are asked only to leave home to buy food or other essentials.
Authorities estimate HCMC needs to disperse 11,000 tons of goods and other essentials to locals daily, and the government has the capacity to enforce that, a trade department official was cited as saying by newspaper Tuoi Tre.
Over recent weeks, officials said that Vietnam had deployed 14,600 additional physicians and nurses to HCMC and its neighboring provinces to provide much-needed assistance in its heavily strained medical infrastructure.
A city of around 10 million people, HCMC has set in place over a dozen makeshift medical facilities since June to treat COVID-19 patients, but the increasing number of infections means thousands of people are not able to be hospitalized.
Just under 2% of Vietnam's 98 million population have been fully immunized against the virus as of Aug. 19, a statement from the health ministry's publication Suc Khoe Doi Song disclosed.
