Vietnam says all its corona-infected patients cured

Vietnam has announced that all 16 infected patients in the country were discharged from hospital and declared cured.

As of Wednesday, all 16 patients, including the oldest who is 73, had been cured and discharged from the hospital, reported Al Jazeera.

For the past 15 days, including on Friday, the government also detected no new cases of infections, the last one having been reported on February 13, even as a village north of Hanoi remains under a 20-day lockdown.

"If fighting COVID-19 has been a war, then we have won the first round but not the entire war because the situation can be very unpredictable," Vietnam's Ministry of Health quoted Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam as saying, referring to the illness caused by the coronavirus, during an online conference with city and provincial officials on Tuesday.

Worldwide, the outbreak has already killed almost 3,000 and infected more than 83,000 as of Saturday.

It is a different story, however, in Vietnam. World Health Organization (WHO) officials and health experts said the government's swift response to the emergency was crucial in containing the crisis at the early stage.

By Wednesday, the Vietnamese government declared that the 16th and final patient infected with the virus had been discharged from the hospital.

The 50-year-old man, identified as NVV, had earlier caught the infection from his 23-year-old daughter, identified only as NTD. Both are natives of Son Loi district in the northern province of Vinh Phuc, where 11 cases were found.

The daughter was one of eight employees of a Japanese company who returned from the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicentre of the virus, on January 17. In all, six people among the group were found to have tested positive for the virus later.

Some of their relatives and friends were also infected, including a three-month-old baby, the youngest coronavirus patient to date.