Aiming to find effective short term and long-term solutions, the Ministry of Science and Technology (MST) invited experts from large healthcare centers, including the Central Tropical Diseases Hospital, Military Medical Academy, Military Hospital 103, HCM City Pasteur Institute and VABIOTECH (the Company for Vaccine and Biological Production No 1) to the meeting.

Phan Trong Lan from the HCM City Pasteur Institute, one of the authors of the article “Importation and Human-to-Human Transmission of a Novel Coronavirus in Vietnam” published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) showed how he and his co-workers had discovered 2019-nCoV infections in Chinese patients.

He mentioned the efforts to keep up to date with information from the World Health Organization (WHO), such as the real-time reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction in order to obtain true test results.

The information with high accuracy not only provides WHO with data but also helps Vietnam understand the epidemiology of diseases caused by this virus.

The information with high accuracy not only provides WHO with data but also helps Vietnam understand the epidemiology of diseases caused by this virus.

This also serves as the basis for Vietnam to be able produce a quick test kit which screens and detects people infected with the virus to isolate them soon, thus avoiding the spread of viruses among the community.

This is especially significant when infected people do not have symptoms and the incubation period of the disease lasts up to 14 days (while the incubation period of SARS-CoV was 4-6 days only).

One of the difficulties that Vietnam faces is the lack of test kits. The number of kits provided by CDC or WHO is limited.

In this situation, the development and production of test kits with high accuracy which gives results after a short time needs to be doneimmediately.

This is not a difficult task. In 2015, the Central Military Hospital 108 successfully developed a diagnostic kit that could detect the MERS-CoV virus with almost absolute accuracy in 3-4 hours.

Le Bach Quang, who was a member of the Executive Board of the KC.10/16-20 Program on developing modern technologies to serve health care, said that racing against the clock in producing such test kits, units need to be assigned to implement the task. They will not have to follow all of the procedures as currently applied. 

Thanh Lich

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