Vietnam quarantines 23 more over coronavirus scare

The northern port city of Hai Phong has put two more cases in quarantine. They are a 18-year-old Chinese from Guangdong Province who developed fever, headache and coughing 10 days after arriving on January 20, and a 44-year-old Vietnamese woman who returned from China’s Chaozhou on January 15 by bus and had fever a few days later.

Health officials in Da Nang, a tourist city in the central region, said on Sunday nine people who had been around Chinese tourists have been quarantined after showing symptoms like high fever and cough.

In Ninh Binh in the north, two Chinese nationals and a local have been isolated at the province general hospital. They returned to Vietnam from China's Zhejiang and Hunan and were hospitalized last Saturday with symptoms of the novel coronavirus.

The north-central province of Nghe An has isolated six patients pending tests after they were hospitalized last Saturday with high fever and cough. All of them returned home from China to celebrate the Lunar New Year.

A woman in Chu Pah District in the Central Highlands province of Gia Lai was quarantined on Sunday.

The 34-year-old woman, whose name has not been disclosed, had returned from Wuhan City, the center of the global epidemic, on January 21 and traveled to many places and contacted 13 of her family members.

Health officials in the northern province of Thai Binh have put two suspected people in quarantine pending tests. One returned from Guangzhou Province in mainland China and the other from Taichung in Taiwan.

Vietnam has reported 236 suspected cases with symptoms like high fever and coughing, including some people who had visited infected areas in China, as of Monday. Of them, 163 have tested negative for the virus and 73 are in quarantine pending test results.

There are eight confirmed cases: a Vietnamese-American who transited in Wuhan en route to Vietnam, four Vietnamese workers returning from Wuhan, two Chinese nationals, and a hotel receptionist who caught the coronavirus infection from the two Chinese.

The Vietnamese government declared the novel coronavirus an epidemic on Saturday.

The death toll from the epidemic has reached 362, with 361 dying in China and one in the Philippines.