HANOI (Reuters) – Vietnam approves its first COVID-19 vaccine and disrupts a major Communist Party meeting in government, state media reported on Saturday as the country struggled with the largest coronavirus outbreak since the beginning of the pandemic its.
Vietnam, a country of about 98 million people that has so far been very successful in fighting the virus, has registered 180 new cases since two cases were reported locally transmitted in the northern Hai Duong province on Thursday.
This is a rapid spread, given that Vietnam has recorded only 1,739 cases and 35 deaths since the disease was first detected a year ago, including 873 locally transmitted infections, thanks to mass testing and a program. centralized quarantine.
“We have experience in managing recent outbreaks,” Deputy Health Minister Nguyen Truong Son said in a government statement on Saturday, adding that officials will try to remove the outbreak by February 6, before the monthly New Year holidays.
The government statement states that materials and equipment designed to combat a hypothetical scenario of up to 10,000 cases will be deployed before the celebration of the Lunar New Year. The head of the coronavirus workforce has previously backed a plan designed to prepare for a 30,000-case scenario.
Vietnam closed two remote coffee-growing districts in the Central Highlands’ Gia Lai province on Saturday after at least five people tested positive for the virus, the government said.
“The disease has spread in the community, the variant is dangerous and spreads very quickly,” said a statement, adding that all cases in Gia Lai were related to the Hai Duong epicenter.
Authorities rushed to test thousands of people, while authorities confirmed that the outbreak had spread to Hanoi, where the ruling party is holding its five-year congress to elect a new leadership.
The state media reported that the congress will end on Monday, a day earlier than planned. The reports did not say why they were later removed from official state news sites.
The Vietnamese Ministry of Health approved a vaccine from AstraZeneca PLC for internal inoculation, after Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said late Friday that the country must have a vaccine in the first quarter.
The government has previously said it is in talks to procure 30 million doses of vaccine.
The port city of Haiphong, where a case of the new outbreak has been detected, has also said it will look separately to provide 2 million doses of vaccine to its population.
Most new cases were reported in Hai Duong, where 2,340 factory workers were isolated after an employee came in contact with a person who tested positive for the more contagious variant B.1.1.7 in the UK of the disease at arrival in Japan in mid-January.
Reporting by James Pearson, Khanh Vu and Phuong Nguyen; Written by James Pearson; Edited by Angus MacSwan