Vietnam, a country of nearly 100 million people, has imposed large scale lock-downs, testing and evacuations in Da Nang after eleven cases of coronavirus were recently identified in the city, NPR reports.
The nation had reported just 431 cases of coronavirus since the pandemic began, thanks in large part to an immediately and comprehensive government response. That’s just four per 1,000,000 people, compared to the US rate of more than 13,000 per 1,000,000.
Four of the eleven cases were hospital workers at a local Da Nang medical center; the other seven were people the unnamed Patient Zero had contact with. The Patient Zero was the first case of community spread the nation had seen in a month, and infected two other people who were identified yesterday.
The government has ordered 12,000 citizens to quarantine and evacuated 80,000 from the city in response to the cases.