Acting Minister of Health Dao Hong Lan on August 3 raised concerns about the risk of concurring diseases in Vietnam in near future and urged COVID-19 vaccination be sped up to ensure medical material supplies.
Speaking at an online conference on COVID-19 vaccination and disease prevention and control, Lan said the COVID-19 pandemic has been bought under control nationwide, facilitating the resumption of social activities and economic recovery.
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| Acting Minister of Health Dao Hong Lan__Photo: suckhoedoisong.vn |
Vietnam has also taken preventive measures to respond to newly emerging infectious diseases like monkeypox.
Across the country, health sectors and authorities are taking measures to control communicable diseases like seasonal flu, dengue, and hand-food-mouth disease.
However, Lan said that disease prevention and control in the past had difficulties and challenges.
In particular, the speed of vaccination against COVID-19 in some localities has not yet reached the required progress, especially the 3rd and 4th doses for people over 18 years old and for children from five to 11 years old.
Lan pointed out that there is even a phenomenon of people avoiding the vaccine.
Communication to encourage people to participate in disease prevention and control, especially vaccination work, has not been as effective as expected, Lan said, adding that resources for disease prevention and control were not guaranteed.
"A shortage of drugs and medical supplies in many places has affected disease prevention and control work," Lan said.
Nguyen Luong Tam, Deputy Director of the Preventive Medicine Department, said that many countries continued to record severe cases and deaths from dangerous infectious diseases and emerging ones.
The COVID-19 pandemic is still complicated and unpredictable and has broken out again in some countries with the appearance of Omicron and its variants BA.4, BA.5, BA.2.75, and BA.2.12.
In the last three weeks, the number of hospitalizations and deaths relating to COVID-19 has increased again.
In Vietnam, in the first seven months of this year, more than nine million cases of COVID-19 were confirmed, accounting for 83.9 per cent of the total caseload. Nearly 11,000 deaths accounting for 0.1 per cent of total infections were reported.
Since the end of March, the pandemic has decreased sharply and is still basically well controlled nationwide, although the subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 of Omicron have been recorded in the country, Tam said.
The number of new cases in the past week increased by 48 per cent compared to the previous week and it is expected that the number of cases will continue to increase in the future.
Tam said that with new variants, the number of new COVID-19 cases would continue to increase. New variants are constantly appearing or evolving, the latest being BA.2.75 and BA.2.12.1, which can reduce immunity over time and can cause new outbreaks.
"If people do not continue to receive booster shots to strengthen community immunity, the risk of COVID-19-19 pandemic outbreak is higher and the number of cases will increase again," said Tam.- (VNS/VLLF)
