Two nurses at Bach Mai Hospital in Hanoi have become the first people working in Vietnam’s health system confirmed as infected with Covid-19, taking the tally of total cases in the country to 87, Vn Express has reported.
One of nurses is aged 34 and started exhibiting symptoms on
March 18. She works in a Covid-19 quarantine zone for the
hospital’s Center for Tropical Diseases.
The other
patient is her 54-year-old colleague who works at the hospital’s HIV Outpatient
Clinic.
The Center for Tropical Diseases in Bach Mai has
been disinfected and has decided to no longer treat patients in-house,
transferring all of them to the National Hospital for Tropical Disease, the report
said.
Nobody else who has come to contacted with the
nurses has contracted the virus so far, but they are being quarantined for two
weeks in a separate wing of the hospital as per regulations.
Seventeen people in Vietnam have fully recovered
from the virus, while 70 are currently being treated throughout the country.
Over 10,000 people have died in the coronavirus
pandemic worldwide, in over 182 countries and regions.