A town of 10,000 inhabitants near Hanoi has been quarantined for fear of the spread of the new coronavirus, a first in the country, we learned Thursday from the Vietnamese Ministry of Health.
His commune’s “quarantine” was ordered for twenty days, the ministry said, while five cases of Covid-19 were detected in this small town in the province of Vinh Phuc, located around 30 kilometers northwest of the Vietnamese capital.
“We are all stranded in the town and we work in our rice fields and gardens” but this will certainly affect a large number of inhabitants having “outside employment as a house painter, worker …”, said Tran Van Minh, a resident, contacted by AFP by phone.
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According to him, “a woman infected her family and her neighbors”.
Fifteen people in Vietnam are affected by the coronavirus epidemic that started in China in December.
The toll rose sharply on Thursday with more than 1,300 people dead and nearly 60,000 infected in mainland China, following a change in the detection method.
These new figures may fuel speculation that the severity of the epidemic, officially called Covid-19 by the World Health Organization (WHO), may have been underestimated.