800,000 more doses of vaccine allocated to HCMC for injection in one week

Deputy Minister of Health Nguyen Truong Son yesterday announced that Ho Chi Minh City is to receive 800,000 more doses of Covid-19 vaccine to aid its fierce fight against the latest Covid-19 outbreak citywide.

Deputy Minister of Health Nguyen Truong Son is delivering his speech in the meeting.

Deputy Minister Nguyen Truong Son affirmed that HCMC is one of the regions in the top list of vaccine distribution. In the upcoming 800,000-dose vaccine batch, the city will focus on subjects mentioned in Resolution No.21 by the Government and workers in its industrial parks.

Prof. Dr. Phan Trong Lan – Head of HCMC Pasteur Institute – shared that the city is able to perform 200,000 injections per day, and thus can finish delivering this Covid-19 vaccine batch to prioritized people in about one week.

The Health Deputy Minister reported that until now, HCMC has had over 1,000 Covid-19 cases and must prepare sufficient medical facilities for the scenario of 5,000 cases, along with locations to accommodate a huge number of isolated F1.

The good news is dangerous Covid-19 hot spots in the city like Phuc Hung religious mission, Ehome 3 apartment block, Vinh Loc Industrial Park, and a site in Hoc Mon District are basically under control now, with a significant decrease of new cases.

The city is now trying its best to track possible patients and their close contacts in the community.

"As the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 has a much faster spreading speed, the medical staff in HCMC must accelerate its testing procedure, using quick-test kits, single and pooled sample testing to detect an F0 as soon as possible for quicker tracking of their close contacts,” instructed Deputy Minister Son.

He added that the National Steering Committee for Covid-19 Prevention and Control has discussed the method of quarantining F1 people at either their manufacturing plants or their places of residence if centralized isolation areas are overloaded, as long as these locations can meet medical requirements for a standard isolation place.

Therefore, the Health Ministry is preparing a draft of criteria for F1, especially people under 15 years old, staying isolated at residence places or manufacturing plants. This model is going to be piloted in HCMC.

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