Covid Situation in Vietnam
From: Greg Nagle <gnagle2000@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, December 8, 2021 7:30 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Covid situation in Vietnam
Good questions about Vietnam and the world. Other informed insights are needed.
BTW, the US has donated 21 million doses to Vietnam, mostly Pfizer, which they got for $7/dose.
I think the Viet authorities are quietly reeling in response to the continued high case loads, Please see at bottom for one opinion on this 5 weeks ago. I have seen little else here on this issue.
I think that they expect that with vaccines it is not such a problem with kids and vaccination efforts are now much focused on kids.
But yes UK had the same problem with kids as vectors for covid before they were vaccinated. But I am not sure about Vietnam, You will note the age distribution graphic in my original post and kids do not seem overly represented here up through Nov 28.
This site follows vaccination efforts and shows a recent decline in doses, I do not know why,
https://tiemchungcovid19.gov.vn/portal
Recently there were 8 deaths associated with both the Pfizer and the Chinese Verocell vaccines. A surprise since I do not recall reports of such deaths in other countries, Please correct me if I am mistaken
The number of cases in spite of vaccinations is discouraging but it appears (?) that more severe cases have decreased . Many cases are being dealt with at home which means they are not as severe,
And after 2 vaccine doses, a mild case of covid can offer a more robust immune system, at least for awhile.
Vietnam also has the Merck anti viral drug for treatment and the Pfizer drug will be here soon, With those in hand the threat of death and severe cases will much decline.
====================
There was this from 5 weeks ago.
Đào HợpVietnam's Covid-19 / SARS CoV-2 News in English
Why is Ho Chi Minh City covered with 2 doses of vaccine and still detects a lot of F0?
09:56, 04/11/2021
Dan Tri - The fact that the coverage rate of 2 doses of vaccine for people over 18 years old is very high, but there are still hundreds of F0 cases detected every day, many people are concerned whether the epidemic in Ho Chi Minh City has been well controlled?
According to information from the Ministry of Health, by the evening of November 3, Ho Chi Minh City recorded an additional 985 cases of Covid-19 infection. Except on November 2, "only" increased 679 cases, on average every 24 hours for more than a week, the locality detected approximately 1,000 F0.
This raises concerns about whether the epidemic in Ho Chi Minh City has been well controlled, especially when more than 13.4 million doses of vaccine have been administered and the rate of full vaccine coverage for people over 18 years old is quite high (more than 5.7 million doses). who received 2 injections).
Vaccine coverage still detects a lot of F0: Is there any abnormality?
Talking to Dan Tri reporter around the above issue, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Do Van Dung, Vice Rector and Dean of the Faculty of Public Health, University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Ho Chi Minh City University of Medicine and Pharmacy, said, first of all, it is necessary to confirm that Ho Chi Minh City is still developing. It is not unusual for the number of patients infected with Covid-19 to be high after a 2-dose vaccine has been given to about 80% of adults.
Because the circulating strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the Covid-19 epidemic in Vietnam is the Delta strain, which is highly infectious. If it is estimated that the number of infections per day is about 1,000 for a population of about 10 million people, that is equivalent to the number of new cases of 70/100,000 people in a week.
According to experts, it is normal for Ho Chi Minh City to still detect a high number of patients infected with Covid-19 after being covered with 2 doses of the vaccine (Illustration image: Hai Long).
To make it easier to imagine, Associate Professor Dung said that it can be compared with countries with good vaccination rates. Statistics show that in Europe, France is considered a typical country that controls Covid-19 well with a vaccine, people's lives are almost back to normal.
However, about a month ago, since the relaxation of epidemic prevention measures, the number of cases per day in France has been around 7,000 cases. This number of new cases corresponds to the number of new cases of 73/100,000 people in a week, equivalent to the epidemic situation in Ho Chi Minh City.
Many other European and Asian countries have a much worse infection situation. For example, the number of new cases per 100,000 people/week in the UK is 428 and in Singapore it is 437, which is 6 times higher than in Ho Chi Minh City.
However, Associate Professor Dung also noted that, although the number of Covid-19 cases in Singapore is high, the number of deaths per 100,000 people per week is 2, equivalent to the current mortality rate in the City.
According to experts, if you accept to live with Covid-19, the number of cases will increase (more or less depending on the country). And now, resources are focused on vaccination to prevent disease, not on testing to find cases, or isolating cases as in the "zero Covid" strategy.
"The Covid zero strategy worked very well a long time ago, when there was no vaccine. At the present time when there is a vaccine, the option of living with Covid-19 will be better for the economy. economy, life and health of the people" - Assoc.
Injected 2 shots but not good 5K: Still infected!
Assoc. Accordingly, if an average of 1,000 F/day is detected, and each case is contagious for 7 days, there will be 7,000 infectious people at a time.
Thus, on average, 1,400 people have one person at risk of infecting others (if the average population of Ho Chi Minh City is 10 million people). Therefore, if there is a large number of people from Ho Chi Minh City to other provinces, it may become a source of infection for people in these localities.
As for the community, the people of Ho Chi Minh City, Associate Professor Dung said, although the number of F0 detected every day is high, this number tends to be stable, and the rate of increase per day if any is less than 5%. In the strategy of living with Covid-19, this number is manageable. Just by increasing the distance measures, people can take care of themselves to prevent the disease, it is possible to slow down the increase in the number of new cases.
Vaccination against Covid-19 in Ho Chi Minh City (Photo: Hoang Le).
When almost 100% of the population have received the first dose and about 80% have received the second dose, the risk of severe disease and death is not high. Assoc. Prof. Dung statistics, of those who have received 2 doses of the vaccine, only about 2% have severe changes and less than 0.5% will die. Therefore, the current number of cases is not worrisome to the city's health.
For individuals, Assoc. Prof. Dung recommended, people who have been vaccinated but do not practice good prevention can still get the disease, although there is little risk of severe progression. In contrast, people who have been vaccinated and done 5K if exposed, the amount of virus entering the body will be limited. "Then the chance of getting sick is very low because the vaccine can protect us from getting sick after mild exposure," - the analyst.
Assoc. Therefore, people must protect themselves from unknown sources of infection in society, by stricter implementation of the 5K measure.
"If everyone thinks and practices like this, the number of cases will decrease," the expert assessed.
Hoang Le
===================================
This was from late September which was a more hopeful time for vaccines here.
The ritual of burning votifs, eg ghost money or joss paper and paper effigies of worldly possessions is to venerate the deceased in a syncretic mix of Taoism, Buddhism and regional folklore dating back over 2,500 years. Mourners believe that burning paper effigies will enable their deceased family members to have all that they will need in the afterlife, it is a repayment of debt of gratitude from the material world and is a means of placating the spirit of the dead to look over the well being of the still living.
Greg Nagle
PhD Forest and watershed science
Cornell University
Hanoi, Vietnam
On Thu, Dec 9, 2021 at 9:41 AM Ben Quick <bnquick74@gmail.com> wrote:
Greg,
Do you think the recent spikes are correlated with schools opening? I know it was expected and presumably accepted by policy makers.
As just an anecdotal data point, my friend tells me the were 60 community transmissions in a local industrial zone (Da Nang). Everyone had been vaccinated, mostly twice.
Anyway, thank you for the great batch of information.
Ben Quick
AUV
On Wed, 8 Dec 2021 at 18:32 Greg Nagle <gnagle2000@gmail.com> wrote:
I do not have any real insights on Vietnam but offer these pieces for discussion.
I assume that list members already have plenty enough to ponder as covid boils along in their own countries. Personally I feel safer here than in much of the US, hard to judge but as with 74% of adults here I have had 2 vaccine doses which is better than the US. But covid cases here are still at a high level and I am not sure why. With a compliant population anxious to get vaccines asap, we do not face the problem of vaccine resistance in too many other places,
There has not yet been omicron identified in Vietnam since travel into here is much restricted, .
Hard to parse out what is going on since cases have really climbed in last 5 weeks with 15,000 yesterday, but I have not yet seen data on how many are breakthrough cases after 2 vaccine doses,
Useful for following daily changes here , it helps to see the chart with data for other SE Asian nations to keep Vietnam in perspective
Covid-19 data in Vietnam
https://vnexpress.net/covid-19/covid-19-viet-nam
In Hanoi and HCM most adults have 2 doses which offers a level of protection but not complete
https://vietnamnews.vn/society/1094872/846-per-cent-of-ha-noi-adults-now-fully-jabbed.html
From when the first vaccine vials touched down in Việt Nam in late February until December 4, a total of 150,623,444 doses have arrived in the country: 48,700,000 doses of Sinopharm’s Vero Cell Inactivated vaccine, 46,688,076 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine, 46,576,370 doses of mRNA vaccine (Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna), along with 5,150,000 doses of Cuba’s three-shot Abdala vaccine and 1,508,998 doses of Sputnik V vaccine.
To date, about 122.15 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered among adults, including 68.95 million first doses and 53.16 million second doses.
Some 95.6 per cent of the adult population have received at least one dose of vaccine, and 73.7 per cent have received two doses.
1/3 of vaccines were donated by COVAX or individual countries, the rest were purchased, at good prices I think, They got the Pfizer for $6dose. You will note how many have been Chinese vaccines,
Another good site which has finely detailed map of the level of current case numbers. click on "translation level" in box for that map.
Sometimes one of the more useful sites to follow, updated every two weeks.
Most recent report.
https://www.who.int/vietnam/internal-publications-detail/covid-19-in-viet-nam-situation-report-70
This looks encouraging since the % of patients needing supplemental oxygen had dropped by more than half. I assume this is due to less severe cases after vaccination.
But.....a less hopeful view,
The number of Covid-19 patients who died in Ho Chi Minh City was the highest since the beginning of October until now
Dan Tri - In the past 24 hours, Ho Chi Minh City has had the highest number of deaths from Covid-19 patients since October 4 until now. The number of Covid-19 patients discharged from the hospital continues to be lower than the number of cases requiring hospitalization.
On the afternoon of December 6, the Ho Chi Minh City Steering Committee for Covid-19 Prevention and Control held a press conference to provide information on the epidemic situation in the area. The press conference took place in the context of the Covid-19 epidemic in the city showing signs of being complicated again after a period of easing social distancing.
At the meeting, Mr. Pham Duc Hai, Deputy Head of the Ho Chi Minh City Steering Committee for Covid-19 Prevention and Control, said that in the past 24 hours, the whole area recorded 1,492 new cases. The city's medical sector is treating 13,681 patients, of which 497 are children under 16 years old, 431 are critically ill, on ventilators, and 14 need ECMO intervention.
Mr. Pham Duc Hai, Deputy Head of Ho Chi Minh City's Steering Committee for Covid-19 Prevention and Control, chaired the press conference (Photo: Quang Huy).
On December 5, Ho Chi Minh City continued to record worrying signs about the situation of the Covid-19 epidemic. Specifically, the number of Covid-19 patients discharged from the hospital was 927, lower than the number of hospitalized patients of 958.
In addition, Ho Chi Minh City also recorded 94 cases of Covid-19 deaths. This is the day with the highest number of Covid-19 deaths in Ho Chi Minh City since the beginning of October until now.
As for vaccination, by the end of December 5, Ho Chi Minh City has injected a total of more than 7.9 million doses of a Covid-19 vaccine, more than 6.8 million people have completed the second injection.
In the morning of the same day, Mr. Duong Anh Duc, Vice Chairman of the People's Committee of Ho Chi Minh City, signed an urgent document on notifying the level of the epidemic in Ho Chi Minh City. Accordingly, the whole area still meets the criteria of level 2 of the Covid-19 epidemic.
However, Ho Chi Minh City has 3 districts with increased epidemic levels compared to the previous week, namely District 4, 11, and Can Gio. Tan Phu District is the only unit whose epidemic level has decreased from level 2 to level 1.
Across the province, the number of new cases of Covid-19 in the week from November 26 to December 2 had a slight increase compared to the previous week. Specifically, the city had 10,901 new cases in the latest week and 8,731 Covid-19 cases recorded from November 19 to November 25. The rate of total new cases/100,000 people/week in Ho Chi Minh City is 107.3. https://dantri.com.vn/suc-khoe/so-benh-nhan-covid19-tu-vong-tai-tphcm-cao-nhat-tu-dau-thang-10-toi-nay-20211206161006708.htm
Greg Nagle
PhD Forest and watershed science
Cornell University
Hanoi, Vietnam
_______________________________________________
Vsg mailing list
Vsg@u.washington.edu
http://mailman11.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/vsg