Health ministry to expand COVID-19 home-treatment

That was announced by Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long at a teletraining course on August 13, providing medical workers from more than 700 district-based healthcare clinics nationwide with knowledge on the monitoring, treatment and care of infections and safe vaccination against COVID-19.

The practical situation in the epidemic-hit localities such as Ho Chi Minh City, Dong Nai, Long An, and Binh Duong have provided valuable lessons, the minister emphasised, pointing to the need to re-organise the healthcare system in a way that provides patients with the fastest and most convenient access to the best possible services.

Long suggested cities and provinces adopt the three-tiered treatment model, with the first being temporary COVID-19 hospitals and grassroots medical facilities, including home-based and community-based ones, which are designed to care for asymptomatic patients.

The second tier should be district-level medical clinics which will be tasked to treat those with moderate COVID-19 symptoms. This tier plays a very important role because if it performs well, it can prevent patients’ conditions from worsening and save their lives, the minister said.

The last tier will be ICUs that admit those in critical condition, he noted.

The MoH requires all localities to prepare themselves with ICU medical supplies and equipment, he said, urging that localities must, without delay, boost their capacity at all tiers to the maximum in order to not be caught off guard by the virus.

Minister Long also announced that his ministry would pilot a scheme for the clinical monitoring and treatment of COVID-19 patients at home in Ho Chi Minh City and in some other localities, using Molnupiravir, a drug proven effective in reducing virus concentrations.

He called on businesses to boost the import of the drug and pharmaceutical firms to negotiate with Molnupiravir producers about production technology transfer.

Field Hospital No. 7 located at Tien Giang University. (Photo: NDO/Nguyen Su)

In Tien Giang on the same day, the province officially put into operation field hospital No. 7 located at Tien Giang University in Than Cuu Nghia commune, Chau Thanh district, with a capacity of 3,000 beds, targeting the isolation, monitoring and treatment of infections in Tien Giang.

Up to this point, Tien Giang had put into use seven field hospitals to treat COVID-19 patients and one COVID-19 Resuscitation Centre with a total capacity of more than 6,300 beds.

Meanwhile, in Dong Nai, the province is preparing a large-scale testing campaign for about 2 million local people to separate F0s from the community.

According to the Centre for Disease Control of Dong Nai province, as of August 13, the whole province had recorded over 12,000 COVID-19 cases, of which more than 1,800 patients have recovered and discharged from hospital.

In the face of the ongoing COVID-19 case spike, the province has developed plans to control the disease, with a focus on testing on a large scale in the whole province, preparing asymptomatic F0 isolation areas and field hospitals with a scale of 25,000 beds, expanding the existing isolation camps to receive F0s and their close contacts in large numbers, and speeding up vaccination against COVID-19.