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After Aggressive Mass Testing Vietnam Says It Contains Coronavirus...

2021-01-04T00:21:41Z

BennyBlodgett9: Created page with " By Khanh Vu, Phuong Nguyen and James Pearson HANOI, April 30 (Reuters) - Businessman Phan Quoc Viet was making his usual prayers at a pagoda in Tay Ninh, a provinc..."

By Khanh Vu, Phuong Nguyen and James Pearson HANOI, April 30 (Reuters) - Businessman Phan Quoc Viet was making his usual prayers at a pagoda in Tay Ninh, a province in southern Vietnam, when the government official's call came. It was late January, just after the Lunar New Year. Vietnam had detected its first two cases of the new coronavirus days earlier, and the government was contacting companies with experience of medical testing for urgent help. "The official said Vietnam needed to act quickly," said Viet, whose medical equipment company, Viet A Corp, makes test kits and has been central to Vietnam ramping up its testing programme in response to the outbreak. Vietnam, a country of 96 million people which shares a border with China, is signalling that it has succeeded where many wealthier and more developed countries have not by containing the new coronavirus. The government is officially reporting a relatively small 270 cases and zero deaths. That puts the country on course to revive its economy much sooner than most others, according to several public health experts interviewed by Reuters. Its slightly more populous regional neighbour the Philippines, in comparison, has reported almost 30 times as many cases and more than 500 deaths. For an interactive graphic tracking the global spread, click website These public health experts say Vietnam was successful because it made early, decisive moves to restrict travel into the country, put tens of thousands of people into quarantine and quickly scaled up the use of tests and a system to track down people who might have been exposed to the virus. "The steps are easy to describe but difficult to implement, yet they've been very successful at implementing them over and over again," said Matthew Moore, a Hanoi-based official from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who has been liaising with Vietnam's government on the outbreak since early January. He added that the CDC has "great confidence" in the Vietnamese government's response to the crisis. Vietnam increased the number of laboratories that can test for COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, from three at the beginning of the outbreak in January, to 112 by April. As of Wednesday, 213,743 tests had been conducted in Vietnam, of which 270 were positive, according to health ministry data. That ratio of 791 tests to every confirmed case is by far the highest in the world, according to data from health ministries compiled by Reuters. The next highest, Taiwan, has conducted 140 tests for every case. To see results by country, click website Reuters could not independently verify the accuracy of the government's testing data. The Vietnamese government did not reply to questions about its data and the extent of its awareness of virus-related cases. The two officials leading the country's efforts against the virus were not made available for interviews to answer questions about their work. Kidong Park, the World Health Organization's representative in Vietnam also did not respond to requests for comment on the accuracy of Vietnam's data. Vietnam has been helped, experts said, by the combination of its authoritarian leadership and its open market economy, and a population with a memory of previous epidemics ready to [https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cooperate,creativecommons cooperate]. "It is organised, it can make country-wide policy decisions that get enacted quickly and efficiently and without too much controversy," said Guy Thwaites, director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City. Thwaites's laboratory has been helping to process tests. Thwaites said the number of positive tests processed by his organisation's lab was in line with government data. He said the hospital where he works on the wards - Ho Chi Minh City's 550-bed Hospital for Tropical Diseases, serving a population of 45 million people in southern Vietnam - had not admitted any additional cases not reflected in the government's numbers. "If there was ongoing and unreported or unappreciated community transmission, we would have seen the patients in our hospital. We have not," he said. Thwaites said his organisation's lab increased capacity from being able to do around 100 tests a day to around 1,000 a day. Managers of 13 funeral homes in Hanoi contacted by Reuters said they had seen no uptick in deaths. One said requests for funerals had gone down during the country's lockdown, now lifted, because of the reduction in traffic accidents, one of the biggest killers in Vietnam. Todd Pollack, a Hanoi-based infectious diseases specialist at Harvard Medical School, said that less than 10% of the people who tested positive for the virus in Vietnam were over 60 - the age group most likely to die from COVID-19. All patients, he added, were closely monitored in health facilities and given good medical care. Pollack said a good comparison to Vietnam was South Korea, another country which managed to roll out a large testing programme and keep deaths relatively low. "The case fatality rate in South Korea is around 2%, in part because they are testing so widely," said Pollack. "If we apply that rate to Vietnam's number of confirmed cases, and consider these other factors, we can understand how they have avoided any deaths so far." Krutika Kuppalli, [https://www.kynghidongduong.vn/tours/tour-chua-huong-dong-huong-tich-ha-noi-tour-du-lich-le-hoi-chua-huong-tu-ha-noi.html Tour Chùa Hương] an infectious disease physician and biosecurity fellow at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said: "There is no way to possibly know for certain, but they have done a great job with their response, with the testing and isolating and quarantining people." PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP In late February, as U.S. President Donald Trump was still downplaying the dangers of the new coronavirus, Viet and his colleagues began sourcing crucial components needed to mass produce COVID-19 testing kits from the United States and Germany. Researchers at Vietnam's state-run Military Medical University, working with Viet A Corp, had already designed a test kit, and the government handed a license to the private company to mass produce the kit. Viet said his company's kits - which can perform multiple tests - had now provided 250,000 tests in Vietnam and had exported kits with capacity for 20,000 tests. As early as Jan. 23, Vietnam suspended flights to and [https://www.kynghidongduong.vn/tours/tour-chua-huong-dong-huong-tich-ha-noi-tour-du-lich-le-hoi-chua-huong-tu-ha-noi.html Tour Chùa Hương] from the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the outbreak started, immediately after discovering its first two cases. It acted even though the WHO was at that point advising against travel restrictions. A week after that, Vietnam effectively closed its 1,400-km (870-mile) border with China to all but essential trade. By mid-March, Vietnam made the wearing of masks in public places mandatory nationwide, well ahead of most other countries and not heeding the WHO's advice that only people with symptoms should wear them. Some of Vietnam's garment factories turned to making surgical and cloth masks to meet demand. The WHO did not reply to Reuters questions on Vietnam ignoring its advice. MASS QUARANTINE Vietnam's testing ramp-up took place in tandem with a thorough contact-tracing programme and the quarantine of tens of thousands of people, many of them overseas Vietnamese returning home to escape worsening outbreaks in Europe and the United States. Viet A Corp's tests were first put into use on March 4, Viet told Reuters. In the six weeks prior to that, the country had gradually increased testing, but the number of people with the virus remained below 20. In the second week of March, that number more than doubled. In early March, only a fraction of the tens of thousands of arrivals in the military-run quarantine centres set up to house them were tested for the virus, according to health ministry data. But by early April, testing numbers began to surpass the number of those in quarantine. Medical officials tested and retested suspected cases, gradually discharging from quarantine those who tested negative several times. Many tests were also made on groups of people not in quarantine who may have been exposed to the virus. The country's swift response does not appear to have been hampered by the retirement of its health minister in November. The interim replacement, Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam, a Communist Party official with no experience of public health, has emerged as a hero on social media for his role leading Vietnam's coronavirus task force. Neither Dam nor Deputy Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long was made available for an interview. (Reporting by Khanh Vu, Phuong Nguyen and James Pearson in Hanoi Editing by Bill Rigby)

Virtual Summit: SE Asia Leaders Meet By Video On Pandemic

2020-12-31T19:00:12Z

BennyBlodgett9: Created page with " HANOI, Vietnam (AP) - Forced apart by the coronavirus pandemic, Southeast Asian leaders linked up by video Tuesday to plot a strategy to overcome a crisis that has threate..."

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) - Forced apart by the coronavirus pandemic, Southeast Asian leaders linked up by video Tuesday to plot a strategy to overcome a crisis that has threatened their economies and kept millions of people in their homes under lockdowns. The 10 leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations held further talks later in the day, also through video conferencing, with their counterparts from China, Japan and South Korea, who expressed support in helping ASEAN fight the coronavirus. Vietnam, ASEAN´s leader this year, has postponed an in-person gathering tentatively to June. "It is in these grim hours that the solidarity of the ASEAN community shines like a beacon in the dark," Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said in an opening speech. Containment efforts have placed the pandemic "actually under control," he said, warning against complacency, with a number of member countries, including Indonesia and the Philippines, fearing spikes in infections after large-scale testing is conducted. Founded in 1967 in the Cold War era, ASEAN - a diverse bloc representing more than 640 million people - has held annual summits of its leaders and top diplomats with ceremonies steeped in tradition, protocol and photo-ops. Derided as a talk shop by critics, the bloc is known largely for photographs of its leaders locking arms at annual meetings in a show of unity despite often-thorny differences. Diplomats say that unity is now crucial as the region battles COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. All of ASEAN´s member states have been hit by infections, with the total number of confirmed cases reaching more than 20,400, including over 840 deaths, despite massive lockdowns, travel restrictions and home quarantines. This image taken in Hanoi, [https://www.kynghidongduong.vn/tours/tour-chua-huong-dong-huong-tich-ha-noi-tour-du-lich-le-hoi-chua-huong-tu-ha-noi.html Tour Chùa Hương] Vietnam, shows a monitor screen of ASEAN leaders attending the Special ASEAN summit on COVID-19 online Tuesday April 14, 2020. Counter-clockwise from top left: ASEAN Secretary General Lim Jock Hoi, Thai President Prayut Chan-ocha, Singaporean President Lee Hsien Loong, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, Malaysia Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin, Indonesian President Joko Widodo, Laos Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, Brunei Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah and Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc. (VNA via AP) Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said the pandemic has had a severe impact on the global economy, but he told fellow leaders that their countries have jointly confronted past crises and have braced for contingencies. "The battle against COVID-19 has made us more aware that we are in a community with a shared future," Li said. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Japan will help Southeast Asia fight the outbreak, including by the establishment of an ASEAN center for infectious diseases. South Korea, among the Asian nations battered by the pandemic early, "confronted numerous challenges head-on" and is now gradually heading into a "phase of stabilization," South Korean President Moon Jae-in said. Intensive testing and tracing, public cooperation and transparency "have proven to be indispensable in our fight," he said. "The COVID-19 crisis is a crisis like no other in the past, not just in its potential calamitous scale but in the hope to contain and stop it by unstinting cooperation and fullest trust between all countries," said the Philippines´ Department of Foreign Affairs. "If any of us fails, the rest will follow." The World Health Organization called on Southeast Asian countries last month to aggressively ramp up efforts to combat the viral outbreak as infections spread. Several visiting participants of a large religious gathering in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in late February reportedly tested positive for the virus after attending the event. But Vietnamese Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh said ASEAN had responded to the outbreak quickly, with his country, as the bloc´s current leader, calling for the need for region-wide action in mid-February, followed by a series of ministerial meetings and consultations with China, the United States and the WHO. Tuesday´s summit included discussions on a regional stockpile of medical equipment for emergencies and establishing a regional fund for combating the pandemic. With travel restrictions and lockdowns across the region, many industries have been hit hard, including the tourism and retail sectors, and growth targets have been revised downward. The overall economic impact of the pandemic on the region will "likely be broad and deep," according to an ASEAN assessment. Hard-hit China, where the virus was first detected in December, is one of the largest trading partners and sources of tourists for Southeast Asia. ASEAN holds about [https://www.kynghidongduong.vn/tours/tour-chua-huong-dong-huong-tich-ha-noi-tour-du-lich-le-hoi-chua-huong-tu-ha-noi.html tour chùa hương 1 ngày],500 meetings a year, but around 230 have been postponed to later this year due to the pandemic, including lower-level meetings with China on a proposed nonaggression pact in the disputed South China Sea. The territorial disputes, which involve China and five other claimants, including ASEAN members Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Brunei, are not part of the formal summit agenda. But the disputes have cast a shadow on the summit after a Vietnamese fishing boat with eight men on board was hit by a Chinese coast guard ship and sank recently near the Paracel islands. All the fishermen were rescued. The other ASEAN members are Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Singapore and Thailand. ___ Gomez reported from Manila, Philippines. Associated Press journalists Edna Tarigan in Jakarta, Indonesia, Preeyapa Khunsong, Grant Peck and [https://www.kynghidongduong.vn/tours/tour-chua-huong-dong-huong-tich-ha-noi-tour-du-lich-le-hoi-chua-huong-tu-ha-noi.html tour chùa hương 1 ngày] Kiko Rosario in Bangkok and Ken Moritsugu in Beijing contributed to this report. Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, background, addresses ASEAN leaders during the Special ASEAN summit on COVID-19 in Hanoi, Vietnam Tuesday, April 14, 2020. ASEAN leaders and their counterparts from China, Japan and South Korea hold the summit online to discuss actions coping with the COVID-19 pandemic. (AP Photo/Hau Dinh) Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, left, and his staff prepare documents ahead of the Special ASEAN summit on COVID-19 in Hanoi, Vietnam Tuesday, April 14, 2020. ASEAN leaders and their counterparts from China, Japan and South Korea hold the summit online to discuss actions coping with the COVID-19 pandemic. (AP Photo/Hau Dinh) A soldier and members of a civil service police force stand guard during a lockdown to help curb the spread of the coronavirus at a checkpoint in Jakarta, Indonesia, Tuesday, April 14, 2020. Forced apart by the coronavirus pandemic, Southeast Asian leaders linked up by video Tuesday to plot a strategy to overcome a crisis that has threatened their economies and bound millions of people in their homes under lockdowns. (AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim) A policeman with face mask and face shield stands guard at entrance of a government-built residence in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Tuesday, April 14, 2020. The Malaysian government issued a [http://www.google.com/search?q=restricted%20movement&btnI=lucky restricted movement] order to the public till April 15, to help curb the spread of the new coronavirus. The new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms for most people, but for some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness or death. (AP Photo/Vincent Thian) Health staff with protective gears take the body temperature of a man at an entrance to the Menara City One condominium as it has been placed under a lockdown in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Tuesday, April 14, 2020. Forced apart by the coronavirus pandemic, Southeast Asian leaders linked up by video Tuesday to plot a strategy to overcome a crisis that has threatened their economies and bound millions of people in their homes under lockdowns. (AP Photo/Vincent Thian) Motorist make their way through Kampung Baru, a traditional Malay village in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Tuesday, April 14, 2020. The Malaysian government issued a restricted movement order to the public till April 15, to help curb the spread of the new coronavirus. The new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms for most people, but for some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness or death. (AP Photo/Vincent Thian) Volunteers spray disinfectant to houses in hopes of curbing the spread of the new coronavirus in Yangon, Myanmar, Tuesday, April 14, 2020. Forced apart by the coronavirus pandemic, Southeast Asian leaders linked up by video Tuesday to plot a strategy to overcome a crisis that has threatened their economies and bound millions of people in their homes under lockdowns. (AP Photo/Thein Zaw) A man rides a bicycle as a car make its way on an empty road near Sule pagoda in downtown Yangon, Myanmar, Tuesday, April 14, 2020. Forced apart by the coronavirus pandemic, Southeast Asian leaders linked up by video Tuesday to plot a strategy to overcome a crisis that has threatened their economies and bound millions of people in their homes under lockdowns. (AP Photo/Thein Zaw) A Gojek driver wearing a face mask on his motorcycle waits for costumers in Jakarta, Indonesia, Tuesday, April 14, 2020. Forced apart by the coronavirus pandemic, Southeast Asian leaders linked up by video Tuesday to plot a strategy to overcome a crisis that has threatened their economies and bound millions of people in their homes under lockdowns. (AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim) A women buys a face mask on a street in Jakarta, Indonesia, Tuesday, April 14, 2020. Forced apart by the coronavirus pandemic, Southeast Asian leaders linked up by video Tuesday to plot a strategy to overcome a crisis that has threatened their economies and bound millions of people in their homes under lockdowns. (AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim) An Indonesian soldier asks a man on a scooter to wear a face mask during the imposition of large-scale social restriction, at a checkpoint in Jakarta, Indonesia, Tuesday, April 14, 2020. Forced apart by the coronavirus pandemic, Southeast Asian leaders linked up by video Tuesday to plot a strategy to overcome a crisis that has threatened their economies and bound millions of people in their homes under lockdowns. (AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim) A worker makes a coffin in Jakarta, Indonesia, Tuesday, April 14, 2020. Forced apart by the coronavirus pandemic, Southeast Asian leaders linked up by video Tuesday to plot a strategy to overcome a crisis that has threatened their economies and bound millions of people in their homes under lockdowns. The new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms for most people, but for some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness or death. (AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim) Workers make a coffin in Jakarta, Indonesia, Tuesday, April 14, 2020. Forced apart by the coronavirus pandemic, Southeast Asian leaders linked up by video Tuesday to plot a strategy to overcome a crisis that has threatened their economies and bound millions of people in their homes under lockdowns. The new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms for most people, but for some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness or death. (AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim) TV screen shows Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, center, addressing the Special ASEAN summit on COVID-19 in Hanoi, Vietnam Tuesday, April 14, 2020. ASEAN leaders and their counterparts from China, Japan and South Korea hold the summit online to discuss actions coping with the COVID-19 pandemic. (AP Photo/Hau Dinh)

User:BennyBlodgett9

2020-12-31T18:59:21Z

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