Da Nang, Vietnam — The government of Vietnam is set to evacuate 80,000 tourists from popular resort city of Da Nang after three residents tested positive for coronavirus.
The authorities of Vietnam are rushing to nip a potential new outbreak in the bud after the country recorded its first locally-transmitted case for Covid-19 in over 100 days on Saturday.
According to Vietnam’s Ministry of Health, the 57-year-old man who tested positive for the virus had no international travel history and had been living in Da Nang for the past month. Two other cases were reported the following day.
The government press of the country says that as the case was announced, Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc demanded that contact tracing be ramped up and a large-scale of testing to be conducted across the city.
The government made the drastic decision to begin evacuating 80,000 people from Da Nang on Monday. The process is said to take approximately four days to be done. The domestic airlines are operating about 100 flights daily to 11 cities around the country for the evacuation.
Da Nang is a tourist hotspot in Vietnam; popular with domestic and international tourists, who flock to the city’s white sandy beaches and seafront resorts. The city welcomed about 8.7 million tourists on 2019 of 5.2 million were domestic travelers.
While the evacuation of thousands of people over three coronavirus cases may seem overzealous, Vietnam is known as a leading example in containing the virus, thanks to an aggressive strategy of early screening of passengers at airports and a strict quarantine and monitoring program.
The country has just confirmed 420 cases for Covid-19 with no deaths due to the virus, according to Johns Hopkins University.
