Vietnam confirms 39th coronavirus patient

By Chi Le   March 11, 2020 | 06:59 pm PT
Vietnam confirms 39th coronavirus patient
Fences are erected to isolate an alley in Hanoi's Cau Giay District, where a young man has been confirmed infected with the novel coronavirus, March 11, 2020. Photo by VnExpress/Ngoc Thanh.
A male tour guide in Hanoi has become the capital city's fifth and nation's 39th Covid-19 patient, Vietnam's Health Ministry said Thursday.

The ministry said that the 25-year-old man, who lives in Dich Vong Ward, Cau Giay District, was serving a tour to the nearby Ninh Binh Province on March 4 when he had direct contact with a British tourist who'd come to Hanoi on the VN54 flight from London on March 2 and later tested positive for the novel coronavirus.

After learning that the British was infected he went to the Saint Paul Hospital in the city to be examined and was transferred on March 8 to the National Hospital of Tropical Diseases in Dong Anh District, where his condition is stable.

His samples tested positive for the novel coronavirus on Wednesday.

The man had direct contact with 20 other people after his interactions with the Brit, and in turn, another 79 people interacted with those 20, and 43 people interacted with the 79, authorities have determined.

On Wednesday, three people in the central province of Binh Thuan who’d come into contact with an infected Vietnamese businesswoman returning from the U.S. tested positive for the novel coronavirus.

They were a house-help, an employee and a daughter-in-law of the 51-year-old woman who flew from Ho Chi Minh City to New York on February 22, transiting at the Incheon International Airport in South Korea for three hours. She landed at the Tan Son Nhat Airport in HCMC on March 2 and took a car home to the resort town of Phan Thiet in Binh Thuan.

A Da Nang saleswoman who served two infected British tourists on flight VN54 was also confirmed infected on Wednesday.

Vietnam has recorded 23 new novel coronavirus patients in the last six days, bringing the total to 39, 16 of whom were discharged weeks ago. 13 of the patients shared flight VN54, including 10 Brits, one Irish and two Hanoians.

The Covid-19 outbreak has thus far spread to 124 countries and territories around the world, killing more than 4,600 people.

 
 
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