4300 stranded overseas Vietnamese to be repatriated on special flights
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A child passenger waits to board a flight back to Vietnam at Dulles International Airport in Washington DC, US on May 15 (local time).

In the past few weeks, planes carrying Vietnamese from Russia, Europe, the UAE and the US have all touched down on home soil.

Inevitably some of those onboard have tested positive for COVID-19, but with strict guidelines in place, each passenger was immediately quarantined after disembarking, vastly reducing the risk of spreading the virus.

On May 13 a flight from Moscow landed at Van Don airport in Quang Ninh bringing home more than 340 people, many of them children and the elderly.

Moments after clearly immigration at the airport, each person along with the Vietnam Airlines crew, was taken into quarantine.

In the days that followed, they were all tested for COVID-19 and so far 29 people from that flight have been confirmed to be carrying the virus.

At the beginning of May, a flight from the UAE touched down at Can Tho International Airport in the Mekong Delta bringing home almost 300 people.

To date, 18 people including a baby under the age of one, have tested positive from that single aircraft.

As these flights continue to bring home people from countries where COVID-19 has hit hard, it is expected that more cases will emerge.

A father takes photo of his children on Trang Tien Street near Hoan Kiem Lake on Saturday.

But with strict rules in place to ensure each passenger is quarantined as soon as they arrive, risks of community infections remain low.

This can be reflected in the news that for more than 30 days, not one locally transmitted case has been detected.

And on Sunday morning, the National Steering Committee for COVID-19 Prevention and Control said there have been no new cases recorded in the last 12 hours.

More and more people have returned home to Vietnam on specially arranged flights in the past few days.

A teenager on a flight from the Philippines has tested positive and tests are being conducted on more than 500 passengers who arrived back to Vietnam from the US and Europe.

On Friday, PM Nguyen Xuan Phuc tasked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to put plans in place to bring more Vietnamese home from overseas.

But he did stress that where possible, people should look at the option of staying in the countries they are now living in to not put added strain on Vietnam’s healthcare system.

Meanwhile on Friday for the first time in three months, Hanoi’s pedestrian street reopened to allow people to enjoy a traffic-free weekend around Hoan Kiem Lake.

It may only be one small gesture as the country gets back to normality, but opening up the walking streets is clearly a step in the right direction.

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