BANGKOK — Vietnam, which had gone 100 days without reporting a case of local transmission of the coronavirus, said on Saturday that a 57-year-old grandfather in the central city of Danang had tested positive. How he got the illness remains a mystery.
To prevent a wider outbreak, the Health Ministry said it was conducting “extensive screening and testing in all at-risk areas in Danang.” Officials said they had tested and quarantined people who had been in close contact with the patient and were tracing others. So far, no other positive cases have surfaced.
The case of the Danang grandfather is yet another sign of how difficult it is to contain the virus even when a country has followed the best practices. The patient has no record of recent travel and appears to be a homebody who spends most of his time looking after his grandchildren.
Health officials, noting that mask use in Vietnam had become lax, urged members of the public to resume wearing them, especially in crowded places and on public transportation.
Vietnam, one of the world’s few remaining communist states, has been among the most successful in the world in containing the virus. Soon after the illness emerged in China, Vietnam’s northern neighbor, the government quickly closed international borders, called for widespread use of masks and established strict quarantine and aggressive contact-tracing procedures.
Most foreigners are still barred from traveling to Vietnam, and returning citizens are required to go into quarantine, which is where all of Vietnam’s other recent cases have been found.
The public has embraced the campaign and rallied around one famous case, that of Scottish pilot, Stephen Cameron, 43, who came so close to death that doctors in Ho Chi Minh City contemplated giving him a double-lung transplant. He spent more than two months on life support in a medically induced coma but recovered and flew home two weeks ago.
As of Saturday, Vietnam had reported 416 cases and no deaths. Its last known case of local transmission was in mid-April. The government has been considering resuming international flights to countries where the virus has been contained.
The discovery of the new case in Danang was a shock. Many people reportedly canceled travel plans in central Vietnam, a popular destination for domestic and foreign travelers.
The 57-year-old man, known as Patient 416, first showed signs of a cough and fever on July 17 and was admitted to a hospital three days later. He was initially diagnosed with pneumonia. An X-ray showed lung lesions and, after he suffered respiratory failure, he was put on a ventilator.
His tests for Covid-19 were positive from the outset, but it was not until Saturday, when the fourth test result came back, that the government officially declared that he had Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
The country’s acting health minister, Nguyen Thanh Long, confirmed the finding at a meeting on Saturday of the National Steering Committee for Covid-19.
Health investigators concluded that the patient had not traveled outside Danang, one of Vietnam’s largest cities, and had rarely left home in the month before becoming ill.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Updated July 23, 2020
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What is school going to look like in September?
- It is unlikely that many schools will return to a normal schedule this fall, requiring the grind of online learning, makeshift child care and stunted workdays to continue. California’s two largest public school districts — Los Angeles and San Diego — said on July 13, that instruction will be remote-only in the fall, citing concerns that surging coronavirus infections in their areas pose too dire a risk for students and teachers. Together, the two districts enroll some 825,000 students. They are the largest in the country so far to abandon plans for even a partial physical return to classrooms when they reopen in August. For other districts, the solution won’t be an all-or-nothing approach. Many systems, including the nation’s largest, New York City, are devising hybrid plans that involve spending some days in classrooms and other days online. There’s no national policy on this yet, so check with your municipal school system regularly to see what is happening in your community.
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Is the coronavirus airborne?
- The coronavirus can stay aloft for hours in tiny droplets in stagnant air, infecting people as they inhale, mounting scientific evidence suggests. This risk is highest in crowded indoor spaces with poor ventilation, and may help explain super-spreading events reported in meatpacking plants, churches and restaurants. It’s unclear how often the virus is spread via these tiny droplets, or aerosols, compared with larger droplets that are expelled when a sick person coughs or sneezes, or transmitted through contact with contaminated surfaces, said Linsey Marr, an aerosol expert at Virginia Tech. Aerosols are released even when a person without symptoms exhales, talks or sings, according to Dr. Marr and more than 200 other experts, who have outlined the evidence in an open letter to the World Health Organization.
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What are the symptoms of coronavirus?
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What’s the best material for a mask?
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Does asymptomatic transmission of Covid-19 happen?
- So far, the evidence seems to show it does. A widely cited paper published in April suggests that people are most infectious about two days before the onset of coronavirus symptoms and estimated that 44 percent of new infections were a result of transmission from people who were not yet showing symptoms. Recently, a top expert at the World Health Organization stated that transmission of the coronavirus by people who did not have symptoms was “very rare,” but she later walked back that statement.
On July 7, he took his 92-year-old mother to a medical center for treatment for her heart ailment and, on July 16, visited her at the hospital where she had been transferred.
On July 17, he began to feel tired and feverish but attended an engagement party. The next day, he went to a family wedding.
Health officials said that more than 100 people with whom he had been in contact had tested negative for the virus. About 50 of them have been placed in isolation as a further precaution.
Specialist teams were sent from other parts of the country, including from Cho Ray Hospital, where Mr. Cameron was treated, to help with the treatment of Patient 416, whose condition appeared to be deteriorating.
“This patient is suffering from acute pneumonia with severe symptoms and rapid progression,” according to a statement posted on Friday by the Health Ministry, and doctors were pursuing “a maximum treatment regimen.”
Chau Doan contributed reporting from Hanoi.
