Country’s flexible strategy to prevent, detect, isolate and control Covid-19 played a key role in successfully battling the pandemic.

Without collaboration with other Covid-19 response teams, it would take a team a few days or even weeks to complete tracing.

Assoc Prof Tran Nhu Duong

THE flexible and creative application of a strategy to prevent, detect, isolate, zone and control Covid-19 had played a decisive role in Vietnam’s successful battle against the pandemic, experts have said.

“This has been an important strategy and contributed to the success of disease prevention and control,” said Assoc Prof Tran Nhu Duong, deputy head of the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemic, adding that the strategy had been consistently applied since the start of the pandemic.

“When a Covid-19 case is detected in the community, the first thing to do right away is to track all the people who have had contact with the patient and quarantine them.

“Those who have had close contact with the patient, known as F1, are at high risk of being infected and can become a source of infection,” he said at a national teleconference to review the fight against the pandemic.

Tracing F1s as soon as a case is detected is a key part of disease containment because there is a very small window in which to track and quarantine contacts before they become infectious.

The incubation period between contact with the virus and start of symptoms might be just 1-2 days or up to 14 days.

Therefore, it was critical to trace and locate contacts as soon as possible before they could potentially infect others, Duong said. Experience during the battle against Covid-19 in Danang showed many patients had travelled to different places, mainly HCM City, Quang Ngai and Quang Nam.

Competent agencies collaborated with those localities to track F1s.

“That approach has made tracing speedy and comprehensive. Without collaboration with other Covid19 response teams, it would take a team a few days or even weeks to complete tracing,” Duong said.