Over the past time, deeply engraved with Uncle Ho's teachings and instructions about “Doctor like a gentle mother” teachings, the medical staff of Da Nang Center for Disease Control (CDC) have always made their great efforts in protecting people’s health as well as controlling and repelling COVID-19 as quickly as possible.

Staff from Da Nang Center for Disease Control analyze nasal swab samples to test for the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Speed up contact tracing and epidemiological investigation duties

Thus far, the complicated developments of COVID-19 has affected all aspects in many localities across Viet Nam, including Da Nang, a key economic hub in Central Viet Nam.

With the function of implementing technical and professional activities on the prevention and control of infectious diseases, the Da Nang CDC has mobilised all resources for the fight against COVID-19.
Accordingly, Da Nang CDC has established working groups which are respectively in charge of acquiring data and reporting active cases, doing contact tracing and epidemiological investigation duties, carrying out the sampling for RT-PCR testing, guiding community-based COVID-19 task forces and monitoring COVID-19 hotspots, and implementing COVID-19 rapid antigen testing.

Simply put, when a new COVID-19 case is documented, based on the information provided by the patient's medical declarations, the grassroots-level medical forces will spread out to locations to find as many contacts as possible for report to the Department of Infectious Disease Control of CDC Da Nang.

Here, the medical staff must task themselves with synthesising locations visited by COVID-19 patients whilst they are infectious in a chronological order.

In fact, in light of the rapid infection rates of new strains of the coronavirus during the past 2 years, staff of the Da Nang CDC has worked around the clock as well as racing against time to trace the epidemiology for the curbing of further COVID-19 spread.

Although not involved in directly treating COVID-19 patients, CDC staff’s mission in pandemic prevention and control has close relation with public health. Under the motto “ fighting the pandemic is like fighting an enemy”, Da Nang CDC have actively boosted mutual cooperation and information exchanges with grassroots localities and healthcare facilities to investigate the epidemiology, grab information, collect swab samples, and sequence data to promptly come up with the most thorough and effective pandemic suppression plan.

Come up with creative ideas in testing

According to Dr Ton That Thanh, the Director of the Da Nang CDC, increasing large-scale screening testing is an important tactic to localise the COVID-19 clusters effectively. During the second COVID-19 wave in 2020, CDC already conducted COVID-19 testing for 230,700 people via the 5-pool sampling method whereby 389 positive cases were promptly detected.

Instead of testing one person at a time, samples from 5 individuals are mixed together, and tested as one. If the test comes back negative, everyone in the pool is clear. If positive, each member of the pool is then tested individually-thus cutting down on the total number of tests.

This group testing method is the fastest and cheapest way to increase novel coronavirus screening as it can save time, chemical reagents and money. In fact, the faster testing for the virus is conducted, the sooner response measures are taken to curb the further spread.

From the effectiveness achieved in the COVID-19 outbreaks in 2020, the Da Nang CDC continues to improve this method to mix 10 samples together in a pooled sample during 2021’s outbreak. Since May 3. Da Nang CDC  has conducted over 4.8 million RT-PCR tests and 181,718 rapid antigen ones.

All in all, despite any difficult conditions, the white-shirted soldiers of the Da Nang CDC are aware that making efforts to build and protect a healthy and peaceful living environment for the people of the city is the ultimate task in the current period. Therefore, they always commit themselves to the noble mission and silently devoting themselves to their work amid an existing complex setting of COVID-19.

Reporting by NGOC PHU- Translating by T.VY