Covid-19 Deaths Rise, Ho Chi Minh Residents are Asked to Stay at Home

INTERNATIONAL   |   HANOI   - Vietnam's business hub, Ho Chi Minh, announced Friday that its citizens will be barred from leaving their homes to slow the rising death toll from Covid-19. To that end, Vietnam's largest city has turned to drastic measures to implement social restrictions.

Vietnam's strictest restrictive order comes amid a spike in coronavirus infections and deaths from Covid-19 despite a weeks-long lockdown to restrict movement in the city of nine million people. Ho Chin Minh has become the epicenter of the outbreak in Vietnam.

"We ask people to stay at home, don't go out. Every house, company, factory must be an anti-virus bulwark," Ho Chin Minh City's deputy head of the coronavirus control authority, Pham Duc Hai, said on Friday.

However, details regarding the movement restriction order, which took effect in Ho Chi Minh on Monday (23/8), have not been announced.
Hai said restrictions on movement should reduce transmission of infection and give authorities a chance to focus on treating terminally ill patients.

Vietnam is slow in procuring vaccines even though the country until the end of April was one of the countries with the best record of successfully preventing the transmission of the corona virus in the world. Vietnam previously recorded only 35 deaths from Covid-19 and less than 3,000 cases of coronavirus infection as of May 1, 2021.

However, since then the number of cases of infection and death from Covid-19 in Vietnam has jumped to more than 312,000 cases and 7,150 deaths. About half of the infection cases and 80 percent of the deaths are in Ho Chi Minh City. Hai said testing and vaccination activities would continue as long as movement restrictions were implemented.

He added that "vaccines are the key to winning the battle against this pandemic". More than half of Ho Chi Minh City's residents have received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, but Vietnam's national vaccination rate is one of the lowest in Asia.