Vietnam’s first community cases of Omicron found in HCMC

The April 30th Police Hospital in District 5 said the patients had gone to a private clinic for treatment of running nose and sore throat.

After rapid tests showed them to be positive for Covid, the clinic sent their samples to the hospital for PCR confirmation tests where staff detected genetic abnormalities in the samples and sent them to the HCMC Hospital for Tropical Diseases for gene sequencing.

On Tuesday afternoon it confirmed they were infected with the BA.1 sub-lineage of the Omicron variant.

The three patients are a 35-year-old living in Binh Chanh District, a 31-year-old in District 11 and a 48-year-old in Go Vap District.

Local authorities are tracing and testing people who came into close contact with the three.

The 70 previous Omicron cases in the country, including 30 in HCMC, were all foreign arrivals isolated on entry.

The Ministry of Health had warned late last year that the risk of Omicron spreading in Vietnam is high and once it happens, it could overload the healthcare system since it is more contagious than Delta.