Daily infection tally rises to 17,000 over 24 hours

Vietnam recorded a further 17,000 new COVID-19 cases on December 30, representing an increase of 3,107 from the previous day, according to the Ministry of Health.

Hanoi continued to suffer the highest number of infections with roughly 1,866 cases, trailed by the southern province of Tay Ninh with 935 cases, and the northern port city of Hai Phong with 838 cases. Elsewhere, Ho Chi Minh City reported 697 new cases.

The past seven days has seen the country record an average of 15,289 daily cases compared to 18,134 daily cases during the previous week.

The same day also saw the Ministry announce an additional 240 COVID-19 deaths, thereby pushing up the national death toll to 32,168 and accounting for around 1.9% of all infections.

The total number of recoveries also climbed to 1,336,644 after a total of 34,102 patients were declared free from the virus.

As of December 29, the country has injected over 149.3 million vaccine doses, with more than 66.86 million people now fully inoculated. In addition, over 4 million third shots, either booster shots or the third shot of Abdala vaccine, have been administered.

Furthermore, Ho Chi Minh City is in the process of stepping up efforts to finalise the injection of booster doses of COVID-19 vaccines for all local adults during January, 2022, earlier than the target set by the Ministry of Health for the first quarter of next year.

Meanwhile, Hanoi is moving to intensify all pandemic control measures following the detection of the first Omicron case on December 28.

Chu Xuan Dung, vice chairman of the Hanoi People's Committee, issued a plan aimed at responding to the detection of the new Omicron variant in the city.

The plan aims to effectively carry out measures which can prevent the Omicron variant from spreading, detect the earliest possible occurrence of the variant in the capital, and prepare control plans in a bid to minimise the impact of the pandemic on people's health and socio-economic activities.

The morning of December 30 saw the Hanoi Center for Disease Control state that in order to proactively monitor the early detection of the Omicron variant, the centre has taken samples from patients with positive RT PCR results. They were subsequently sent them to the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology for gene sequencing. The results indicate that 15 out of 22 samples submitted were of the Delta variant, not of the Omicron variant, whilst the remaining seven samples were not loaded with enough of the virus for gene sequencing.