The Health Ministry has confirmed a man who came to work in Vietnam from Indonesia in March as negative for the new coronavirus, after performing a second test Wednesday night.
All 145 people who had come into close contact with him also tested negative for Covid-19.
The results were confirmed Thursday morning after Ho Chi Minh City Pasteur Institute, Vietnam’s leading epidemiology facility, conducted a Real Time Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) and an Elisa test on the man’s samples.
The man, 31, is an Indonesian resident who came to Vietnam on March 11.
After landing at Tan Son Nhat Airport in Ho Chi Minh City, he was transported straight to the city’s neighboring province of Binh Duong for working.
During the past time, he has been staying at Au Lac Hotel in My Phuoc Ward, Ben Cat Town of Binh Duong to go to work as an engineer at factory No.4 of Kyungbang Vietnam in Bau Bang Industrial Park in Ben Cat.
On June 30 he and an Indonesian colleague went to the Family Medical Practice clinic in HCMC’s Thao Dien Ward in District 2, home to an expat community in the city, to test for the novel coronavirus before leaving for Indonesia.
After the test result from the clinic came back as positive, he was taken to the Binh Duong General Hospital Tuesday evening.
According to the Health Ministry, he is now in stable condition, so as all people who had close contact with him, who are 132 personnel at his company, seven staff at the hotel, two staff at a restaurant and four medic workers at the clinic in District 2.
In Vietnam, any case suspected to be infected with Covid-19 needs to be confirmed by another round of testing using RT-PCR and Elisa tests. There are only a few dozen institutions in the country qualified for performing such procedures. The District 2 clinic is not among those and it has not been clear which testing method it had used on the Indonesian man.
With the Indonesian confirmed as negative, Vietnam has gone 77 days without recording community transmission of the disease.
The nation’s tally now stays at 335. Of them, 19 are active cases after 326 have recovered.
The latest recovery, announced on Wednesday afternoon, is a 24-year-old returnee from Kuwait. He was confirmed as a Covid-19 patient on June 17 and has been treated at the HCMC Hospital for Tropical Diseases since.
The Covid-19 pandemic has so far spread to 213 countries and territories, claiming almost 518,000 lives.