Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam

The Deputy PM made the statement when chairing an online conference on the prevention and fight against the COVID-19 epidemic on Tuesday with representatives of 63 provinces and cities.

“Quarantine is the best measure now,” he said.

Although quarantine was inconvenient for the people in question, it was their responsibility to themselves and the community, he said.

We persuaded them to enter quarantine softly but firmly, he added.

He also said besides fighting the disease, the relevant agencies were told to help people resume their daily lives.

He said recently, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, the Ministry of Health as well as the Ministry of Education and Training had co-operated to issue guides for safe travel and schooling.

He added that dissemination played an important role in the fight against the disease. It provided people with knowledge of the disease to dispel fears and avoid negligence.

He required relevant agencies and localities to have appropriate dissemination so that people could work together to assist authorised agencies to find, monitor and manage people that were at high risk of contracting the disease.

He said: “If fighting the COVID-19 epidemic is a war, we have won the first battle, but we have yet to win the whole battle, because the situation is very unpredictable.”

“The important thing is we have faith and adhere to the anti-epidemic principles,” he said.

According to Dam, Viet Nam has prepared four scenarios to cope with the COVID-19 epidemic with the slogan “always anticipate the worse situation so that the situation does not get worse.”

Viet Nam's anti-epidemic motto consisted of five points: prevention; early detection; quarantine; zoning; and extinguishing, he said.

Although the epidemic situation had changed, we still needed to follow the anti-epidemic principles of “flexible in strategy and tactics”, he said.

Viet Nam has taken strong, early and active measures but always communicated to seek an international consensus to prevent the disease because the country determined that prevention and control of the COVID-19 epidemic was a global issue, he said.

In the fight against the disease, Dam has directed the national health sector to work with mobile operators, the press and information technology companies to give information timely and transparently as soon as possible to the people and social media users.

Dam said “We have controlled the disease so far.”

Viet Nam was believed to have the highest risk of contracting COVID-19 due to its long border with China, he said.

There were a lot of trading activities between Viet Nam and China. However, Viet Nam recorded only 16 people testing positive for SARS-CoV-2, he said.

We have combined many measures to successfully treat patients of the COVID-19 infection, including those suffering from background diseases, elderly people, foreigners and even 3-month-old baby, he said.

“All 16 patients have completely recovered so far,” he said.

One of the lessons was the treatment of patients should be at grassroots hospitals, combined with the application of information technology so that leading doctors and experts could support remotely instead of taking all patients to one hospital, he added./