Developing long-term COVID-19 control plan

Medical staff take samples for COVID-19 test for people. (Photo: VNA)

Hanoi (VNA) – Over the past three years of fighting the COVID-19 epidemic, Vietnam has undertaken appropriate responses to the epidemiological situation within the context of each period.

On May 5, 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the was no longer a public health emergency of global concern and introduced a new strategy in COVID-19 prevention for the period 2023-2025. The campaign seeks to help countries transition from an emergency mechanism to a long-term prevention and control strategy for this epidemic.

Against this backdrop, Vietnam is also preparing steps to move COVID-19 from a group A infectious disease to a group B at an appropriate time.

The new WHO strategy will maintain the two goals of the previous plan, launched in 2022, to reduce the spread of disease and to provide treatment that reduces mortality, morbidity and long-term consequences.

However, the new plan adds a third goal of “supporting countries as they transit from emergency response to more sustainable COVID-19 management, control and prevention”.

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(Photo: Vietnam+)

On that basis, Minister of Health Dao Hong Lan said that following the direction of the Prime Minister, the Ministry of Health is coordinating with other ministries and branches to review legal regulations and learn from other countries’ experiences.

Vietnam’s will also utilize practical measures to prevent and control the epidemic, from which to build a classification file to switch the disease from group A to group B.

The Ministry of Health also developed a plan for control and sustainable management and proposes to bring it up COVID-19 vaccine into routine immunization.

It is noteworthy that Vietnam has implemented the Government’s Resolution 128 on “Safe adaptation, flexibility and effective control of the COVID–19 pandemic“, from October 2021.

Associate Professor Tran Dac Phu, former head of the General Department of Preventive Medicine and senior expert of the Vietnam Public Health Emergency Operation Centre, said that the current situation of the COVID-19 epidemic in Vietnam remains under control.

According to Mr. Phu, if COVID-19 is classified in group B along with other infectious diseases, COVID-19 must still be a specific disease because WHO has not announced the end of the COVID pandemic.

At the same time, WHO still recommends that countries should be cautious and switch from urgent epidemic prevention and control to a sustainable and long-term epidemic control strategy.

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A special isolation area at a hospital. (Photo: Vietnam+)

According to the Minister of Health, the agency continues to develop a sustainable response plan to the COVID-19 pandemic in the new situation by taking into account the context of dangerous new variants appearing, and other respiratory infections.

Since the beginning of the epidemic, Vietnam has had 11,613,559 cases of COVID-19, ranking 13 out of 231 countries and territories. With the rate of infections/1 million people, Vietnam ranks 120 out of 231 countries and territories (117,364 cases per million people on average).