Weekly COVID-19 update: 36 new cases confirmed, 38 recoveries

Of the figure, there were nine foreigners including eight foreign experts (four from India, one from the Philippines, one from the RoK, one from Japan, one from Russia) and a Russian baby. The rest of the 27 newly-infected cases are Vietnamese returnees of whom two were repatriated from Romania, four from Japan, two from the Czech Republic, four from France, two from the RoK, 12 from Russia, one from the UK.

Meanwhile, 38 patients were declared free of the virus over the past week, raising the total number of recoveries to 1,179. The number of death related to the disease remained at 35.

As many as 15,375 people who had close with COVID-19 patients or entered Viet Nam from pandemic-hit regions are being quarantined nationwide, including 178 in hospitals, 14,319 in state-designated establishments and 878 at their residences.

The country has entered the 88th consecutive day without a single domestic infection of Covid-19 as of 7:00 am on November 16, 2020.

Minister of Health Nguyen Thanh Long urged testing for COVID-19 to be accelerated, warning about very high risks of coronavirus transmissions from other countries as the pandemic situation remains complicated around the world.

The Minister warned about transmission risks posed by illegal entries, adding that 77 people had been caught while trying to illegally enter Viet Nam on November 23 alone. Meanwhile, although the Ministry of Health (MoH) has issued a number of guidelines for quarantine sites, the lack of vigilance remains at several establishments, especially hotels and other civil accommodation facilities.

The minister also emphasized the need to monitor imported food, noting that the MoH has ordered that frozen food shipped from pandemic-hit countries must undergo COVID-19 testing since the coronavirus can survive for a long time./.

By Kim Loan