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The Hanoitimes – Bluezone is a Bluetooth-based app that helps determine whether or not a person has come into contact with a Covid-19 patient.

As of 11:30 am, March 2, the Bluezone app recorded over 30 million downloads, according to statistics released by the Department of Computerization under the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC).

The number of people downloading and using Bluezone, smartphone application for tracing those at risk of Covid-19 infection, has increased dramatically in the last three weeks, since the third Covid-19 outbreak in Vietnam on January 28.

Bluezone application is widely used by Vietnamese people. Photo: Trung Kien

Da Nang, Hai Duong, Hanoi, Quang Ninh, and Ho Chi Minh City are the top five provinces and cities in the country in terms of Bluezone users, the Department of Computerization said.

It added that more than 30 million Bluezone users can make medical declarations online right on the application.

Besides, Bluezone also added features such as sending feedback, through which people can report to authorities about cases at high risk of Covid-19 infection, calendar and among others.

In the time ahead, Bluezone will improve the function of monitoring vaccination.

Since determining Bluezone as instrumental in tracing people’s interaction history, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc has called on people in Vietnam to install the application.

The contract tracing app, developed by tech firm Bkav, uses Bluetooth Low Energy, a wireless personal area network technology, for smartphones to communicate in close range of up to two meters.

If a user is positive for coronavirus (known as person F0), health authorities can identify those who are exposed that person (known as F1), and the system will alert them about the risk of infection.

They will be also provided with instructions on contacting health authorities for assistance.

The app is completely confidential, keeping anonymity of users, and transparent, as it only stores data on the user’s phone and does not transfer user’s information or reveal their locations to the system.

Bluezone’s effectiveness was proven when it helped the medical agencies track thousands of people who had close contact with an infected person or a suspected case.

Thereby, the larger the community of Bluezone users is, the lighter the workload of the front liners in the anti-pandemic battle, said health authorities.

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The Hanoitimes – Israeli ambassador to Vietnam Nadav Eshcar finds working in Vietnam as a privilege. From the startup nation’s target to the battle against Covid-19, the country is on its right track, he told Hanoitimes.

“Feel much at home here”

Had you been here before  serving as an ambassador? How do you find living in Vietnam?

I’m here for almost three years and a half which is significant time. It allows me to see the country evolves during this time. I have been here before as tourist with my wife years ago. We came for the Tet holiday in 2003 (17 years ago). It is a fantastic visit which gave us the flavor of Vietnam and making us always think that we would come back here one day.

Israeli ambassador to Vietnam Nadav Eshcar

And happily and gladly, we did it. I am working here as an ambassador since the summer of 2017. I think this is one of the most interesting as well as pleasant place for me to be a foreign diplomat. The country is so beautiful, the people are so welcoming and we feel very much at home here.

Could you outline some cooperation targets between the two countries in the time ahead?

Besides, Vietnam has developed fast and been moving fast forward becoming a more interesting place to work. I think the relationship between Israel and Vietnam is also running fast forward. We are very active here. There is a huge interest by Vietnamese side in Israel and vice versa, in developing business sales, in developing new fields of cooperation.

We also cooperate in so many fields like agriculture, education, start-up and cyber security, innovation and of course, quality clever and so much more. I think it is very privileged for me to be here in this time.

Vietnam as an influential or significant player in international arena

Success in science-technology and startup is one of the most outstanding stories when we talk about Israel? How does Israel do that?

Basically, our society  evolved from the society of minority. We needed to excel in order to success, excel more than the majority. This is also our condition in a long run. We appreciate the excellence very much. This is one thing. The second thing is we are from a harsh country in the sense of natural resources. No water, almost dessert, it’s hard to give food or develop agriculture for people to live there. So, we need to innovate. We succeed by innovation and ideas. It’s great achievement. it’s about the mentality of people.

Vietnam also heads towards becoming a start-up country. Any experience that Israel can share with us and any bilateral cooperation between the two countries on the way?

I think Vietnamese people are no less clever, may be cleverer, and very capable and so innovative. And I think the capability of the Vietnamese to achieve those achievement is guaranteed with the help of the government, with the help of improving the academy. I think Vietnam is on the right track to be just like that.

At the moment, Vietnam and Israel are working together in many issues. In almost every aspect of our cooperation, I think you can find the issue of innovation and the issues of technology. And we are very happy to share our experience with Vietnam.

And we are happy to learn from Vietnamese experience as well. I think that the Vietnamese side is always eager to exchange with us – that how I feel when I arrived  here. For example, when we talk about ecosystem of innovation – this is one of example from our projects we are doing with Ho Chi Minh authority. Our accelerator will join with the Vietnamese accelerator to work together and push a team of Israeli and Vietnamese to start it up, guide them on how to startup from ideas to a company.

And the main thing is not to push this specific team but to practice how to accelerate together. This is something very advanced on the concept of cooperation, not just “let’s do something together” but “let’s create/proceed something together”. This is something meaningful and this is going happen this year and we are looking forward to that.

I think Vietnam is raising its head as a player, as a more influential or significant player in international arena. By far, the best achievement of Vietnam is that how the country manages to handle the pandemic of Covid-19 because it is among of very few countries in the world that basically manage to stop the pandemic at its gate. It was stopped very quickly and very successfully.

With great determination, with great professionalism, this is huge success story in this time. This is the biggest story in the world – the story of Covid. So I think in this time, when we move from 2020 to 2021, the eye of many countries are looking at Vietnam as a role model and as an example of how to contain the pandemic.

Thank you so much!

The Hanoitimes – The foreign man was confirmed posthumously to be positive for the novel coronavirus in the third Covid-19 test.

The Hanoi Department of Health on February 14 confirmed the death of a Japanese man in Somerset West Point hotel in Tay Ho district and has quickly tracked people who had come into contact with him.

The foreign man was confirmed posthumously to be positive for the novel coronavirus in the third Covid-19 test.

Local authorities have quarantined 139 hotel employees and guests and sterilized the area surrounding the building which accommodated the Japanese. Photo: VGP

The municipal authorities immediately have put 139 hotel employees and guests at the hotel under quarantine.

According to Hanoi police, the Japanese man, born in 1967, entered Vietnam on January 17 and was immediately put under quarantine at a centralized isolation camp in Ho Chi Minh City’s Tan Binh district.

His two tests on January 17 and 31 were negative for Covid-19 and he was allowed to leave the quarantine camp for Hanoi on a flight on February 1. He self-isolated in the hotel from February 1 till he was dead.

Currently, 21 police officers who were examining the corpse and the hotel staff have been exposed to the coronavirus. Local authorities have sterilized the hotel and its premises. All 12 guests in the hotel’s ninth floor where the Japanese man was staying and hotel employees have been quarantined.

Mr. Khong Minh Tuan, deputy head of the Hanoi Center for Disease Control (CDC) said that at first health authority will ask with the man’s employer to provide footage from surveillance camera so that the health sector can track his contacts.

The cause of his death has yet to be confirmed. The Japanese Embassy in Vietnam has transferred the man’s body to the morgue of the Vietnam-Germany Friendship Hospital. Tay Ho district’s medical authority has been investigating his travel history. Areas in and around the hotel were disinfected.

The Hanoi’s Centre for Disease Control is looking for those who had come into contact with the Japanese man. Photo: MoH

The Hanoi CDC is looking for those who had come into contact with the Japanese man, or visited places he had been to at the same time which are:

– IBIS Hotel, Ho Chi Minh City, the night of January 31.

– Flight VN254 from HCMC to Hanoi, from 11:00 am to 1:20 pm on February 1.

– Somerset West Point serviced apartments, No.2 Tay Ho street, Quang An ward, Tay Ho district, Hanoi, February 1 to 13.

– Red Sun River Building (P903 and Tokyo Red Grill Restaurant on the second floor), No. 23 Phan Chu Trinh street, Hoan Kiem district, Hanoi, 12-1 pm on February 2.

– Hachi Ju Hachi Restaurant, No. 168 Xuan Dieu street, Quang An ward, Tay Ho district, Hanoi, 6-8 pm on February 3.

– Raffles Medical Clinic, No. 51 Xuan Dieu street, Quang An ward, Tay Ho district, in the mornings of February 4 and 8.

– Torikichi Restaurant, No. 75 Kim Ma Thuong street, Linh Lang ward, Ba Dinh district, Hanoi, 7-9 pm on February 5.

Local administrators advised people who might have met the man in above-mentioned venues to contact their near by medical facilities or call 0969-082-115 or 0949-396-115.

At the time of writing, Vietnam has had additional 34 new cases of Covid-19 including 31 cases in northern province of Hai Duong and three cases in Hanoi, according to the Ministry of Health.

The new cases brought the total number of infections in Vietnam to 2,229, including 1,331 domestically-transmitted cases, according to the National Steering Committee for Covid-19 Prevention and Control.

Vietnam has closed its borders to foreign visitors since March last year, only allowing entry to certain people like international experts and diplomats who will be quarantined upon arrival.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – FEBRUARY 25: Lorraine Harvey, an in home care worker, receives her first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine from registered nurse Rudolfo Garcia at a clinic at Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in South Los Angeles on February 25, 2021 in Los Angeles, California. African Americans and Latinos comprise a majority of the South LA community and are dying of COVID-19 at a rate significantly higher than whites. Vaccine equity has also lagged in South Los Angeles relative to some more wealthy areas. (Mario Tama/Getty Images/AFP)

Brazil hit 250,000 fatalities — the second-highest national death toll after the US — while the worldwide vaccine campaign received the royal endorsement of Queen Elizabeth II, 94, who urged people not to be wary of the injection.

President Joe Biden declared the US rollout is now “weeks ahead of schedule” as he celebrated 50 million vaccines administered since he took office on January 20, but he warned Americans to keep masking up.

“We’re moving in the right direction despite the mess we inherited,” Biden said, referring to the program under his predecessor Donald Trump.

The United States is the world’s hardest-hit country, with coronavirus deaths crossing the 500,000 mark earlier this week.

Biden said that there would be “enough supply” for all adult Americans by the end of July.

The EU announced Thursday it expected to vaccinate 70 percent of adults by the end of the summer, after months of problems and friction.

European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said fully vaccinating just under three-quarters of adults by late summer was a “goal that we’re confident with.”

But in Brazil, the grim quarter-million deaths milestone came one year after the first Covid-19 case was confirmed in the country, which is struggling with severe vaccine shortages and a devastating second wave.

– Mass graves –

The coronavirus has hit especially hard in Brazil’s impoverished “favelas,” among indigenous communities and in the Amazon rainforest city of Manaus, where there have been haunting scenes of mass graves and patients suffocating to death with no oxygen.

President Jair Bolsonaro has flouted expert advice on managing the pandemic, railing against lockdowns and face masks and instead touting the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, despite studies showing it is ineffective against Covid-19.

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth said in a video message Thursday that her coronavirus jab “didn’t hurt at all” and encouraged those reluctant about receiving the vaccine to “think about other people.”

The monarch was vaccinated along with her husband Prince Philip in January.

In total, 2,500,172 deaths and 112,618,488 cases have been reported, with almost half of the fatalities occurring in just five countries: the United States, Brazil, Mexico, India and Britain, according to an AFP count based on official figures.

Vaccine rollouts have been patchy so far, and most of the 217 million vaccine doses administered globally have gone to wealthier countries.

In China, where the virus first emerged in late 2019, the national drug authority approved two more vaccines made by domestic companies for public use, bringing the number of Chinese vaccines to four.

Two Cuban vaccines will undergo advanced clinical trials from March after they reportedly elicited a “powerful immune response” in early tests, one of the scientists in charge of the project said Thursday.

– Focus on long-term symptoms –

In further vaccine developments, frozen vials of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine may be stored at temperatures commonly found in pharmaceutical freezers for up to two weeks, the US Food and Drug Administration said Thursday.

The move loosens a previous requirement that the vaccine should be stored at ultra-low temperatures, between -112 and -76 degrees Fahrenheit (-80 to -60 degrees Celsius).

The World Health Organization (WHO), meanwhile, urged governments to try to better understand the long-term consequences of coronavirus on some sufferers who have prolonged symptoms such as tiredness, brain fog, and cardiac and neurological disorders.

“It’s a clear priority for WHO, and of the utmost importance. It should be for every health authority,” said Hans Kluge, regional director for WHO Europe.

Britain, which has forged ahead with its vaccine drive, said Thursday it was lowering its alert level from the highest tier, citing a dip in cases.

In France, hopes of a return to normal on the sports front were dashed after more than a dozen rugby players and staff tested positive, forcing Sunday’s Six Nations match against Scotland to be scrapped.

In another sign of the toll the pandemic is taking on populations, the number of babies born in France in January also fell by 13 percent, the biggest drop in 45 years.

And in Japan, organisers of the delayed Olympic torch relay said fans could line the route when it kicks off next month, but cheering is strictly banned and social distancing will be enforced.

Some sex workers in Bangladesh’s largest brothel started getting their vaccines, a health official said Thursday.

Beauty, 40, who goes by one name, said she was initially hesitant about getting the shot.

“But the health officials reassured us. Now we understand it is important as we meet many people every day,” she said.

Syria will start giving coronavirus vaccines to its healthcare workers across the war-ravaged country from next week.