HANOI -- Once seen as a model country in the fight against the pandemic, Vietnam is now battling a sudden surge in new infections that started in May.
The soaring numbers are possibly being caused by a new mutation of the coronavirus -- a hybrid of the Delta variant first identified in India, and the Alpha variant first found in Britain.
According to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University in the United States, Vietnam confirmed 245 new cases of the coronavirus on Wednesday, a significant jump from the double-digit numbers recorded in early May.
Through the end of May, a total of 7,432 people had been infected since last year, representing a 2.5-fold increase in just one month from the 2,928 at the end of April.
Large clusters mainly of the Indian variant have been emerging one after another, from in an industrial estate in the northern province of Bac Giang near Hanoi to a Christian facility in Ho Chi Minh City in the south.
Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long on Tuesday warned that if appropriate measures were not taken, the country would sink into a critical situation.
As local governments impose lockdowns by closing businesses and forcing people to stay indoors, they have begun putting in the structure to conduct more tests in order to get an earlier grasp on the number of infections.
In Ho Chi Minh City, medical students have been mobilized to double the number of tests carried out per day to 100,000.
-- Characteristics of both
Vietnam had been successfully curbing the number of infections through strict entry regulations and quarantine measures, earning praise as a model country in the fight against the pandemic.
While the causes behind the latest surge remain unidentified, the Vietnamese government drew attention when it announced on May 29 that it has detected a new variant of the virus. At a government meeting, the health minister Long warned of the new variant as being extremely dangerous.
According to VN Express, the government news website, the new variant was found in the genetic analyses of several infected people, and contains characteristics of both the British and Indian variants. It is highly contagious, the site said.
-- Low vaccination rate
The recent surge has spurred the Vietnamese government to switch into high gear in its efforts to secure vaccines. This was necessitated due to delays in receiving a planned 80 million doses before the end of the year from COVAX, an international framework for joint purchase and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.
According to Our World in Data, a database mainly compiled by Britain's University of Oxford, Vietnam's vaccination rate as of Monday was 1%, the lowest among the 10 member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
Vietnamese President Nguyen Xuan Phuc has sent letters to U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin, asking for their help in procuring vaccines.
Although Beijing has been in the forefront of "vaccine diplomacy," Vietnam has not received any of its vaccines, a possible offshoot of the deepening confrontation between the two countries over territorial disputes in the South China Sea and other issues.
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