Vietnam's PM tells officials to scale up measures as COVID-19 cases surge

Nguyen Xuan Phuc, the Prime Minister of Vietnam on August 3 asked government officials to scale-up the work to curb the coronavirus outbreak that has reappeared in the country. According to reports. Phuc told officials during a meeting on Monday that early August will be the decisive period to block the transmission of the virus and stop it from spreading in a large scale. As per the state-run broadcaster VTV, Phuc asked officials to concentrate more on Danang, a municipality in Vietnam, where the virus has re-emerged in various clusters recently. 

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COVID resurgence in Vietnam

According to reports, Phuc further told officials that the latest wave of the virus could be more deadly than the previous one and ordered them to both contain the spread of the disease and also maintain the supply chain, hinting at keeping the economic sector running as usual, unlike previous containment measures that saw lockdowns and other restrictions. Vietnam was hit hard by the pandemic economically like most of the world as the socialist state witnessed the slowdown of private and national industries. Vietnamese government imposed lockdown across the country on March 31 and by May 11 authorities had already started a nationwide tourism campaign to boost the tourism sector that had been affected by the shutdown. 

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According to figures by Johns Hopkins University, Vietnam has recorded 621 confirmed COVID-19 cases so far, of which 6 people have lost their lives. Vietnam, if compared to some of the other countries in the region have fared relatively well in tackling the crisis with even fewer cases that the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Meanwhile, the world has logged in more than 18 million infections and at least 6,89,000 deaths to date, of which the United States, Brazil, and India are the top three most affected nations. 

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