Both cases are direct contacts of Case 1,347.
Tuoi Tre reports that last night, the Ministry of Health announced two new cases of COVID-19 community transmission in Saigon, both linked to Case 1,347.
Two new patients include a one-year-old whose parents asked Case 1,347, a teacher at an English center who contracted the virus from a Vietnam Airlines flight attendant, to watch the child several times in the last week of November, as well as a 28-year-old student at the language center.
Officials were carrying out contact tracing and testing related to the new cases, while the businesses which Case 1,347 had visited were closed and sanitized. His infection broke an 88-day national streak of no known community transmission.
In response to these developments, the government has halted inbound commercial flights, which were already heavily restricted, until further notice. Initially, repatriation flights returning Vietnamese citizens from Japan, South Korea and Taiwan were expected to continue, but those have now been postponed as well.
Meanwhile, Tuoi Tre adds in another article that the Vietnam Airlines quarantine facility in Tan Binh District where the flight attendant who started this cluster had stayed for four days has been closed. The airline, meanwhile, has said that once the individual in question left their facility for home isolation, ward officials took over responsibility for ensuring that he maintained strict isolation.
The news source also reports in Vietnamese that roughly 100,000 students in Saigon have had in-person classes canceled due to contact tracing related to the new COVID-19 cluster. Education institutions including the University of Finance-Marketing, the Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology, Ton Duc Thang University, and the Ho Chi Minh City University of Foreign Languages and Informatics have told students to stay home until December 6, after which further decisions will be made.
As of this writing, 737 of 800 F1 and F2 contacts of the confirmed cases have come back negative after undergoing coronavirus testing, while the remaining results are pending.
