Đà  Nẵng City's Centre  for  Diseased Control conduct testing  for people working at  the Đà  Nẵng  International  Airport. Photo nhandan.comm.vn

HÀ NỘI ­­– Prime Minister Phạm Minh Chính has awarded certificates of merit to collectives and individuals of Hà Nội’s Đông Anh District and Đà Nẵng City’s Centre for Disease Control (CDC) for their outstanding work of COVID-19 prevention and control.

Three collectives and four individuals of Đông Anh District were honoured for their three-layer pandemic prevention model including people and officials of Đông Anh District, Đông Anh District Health Centre, people and officials of Lỗ Giao Village of Việt Hùng Commune, Secretary of the district’s Party Committee Lê Trung Kiên, chairman of the district’s People's Committee Nguyễn Xuân Linh, director of the district’s Health Centre Nguyễn Tiến Cương, and head of Lỗ Giao Village Nguyễn Hữu Phan.

According to Kiên, as soon as an F1 case was detected in the district on April 30, the local authority quickly implemented disease prevention and control measures in accordance with the guidance of Hà Nội authorities and the Ministry of Health to zone and strictly manage the pandemic outbreak.

Along with the measures, the district carried out a creative way to concretise the Prime Minister's directives by applying a three-layer zoning model in quarantined places to ensure safety, trade and transport and not upset people's lives.

In the three-layer model, based on the PM's directives, all positive patients are isolated as the core layer. For the second layer, there are checkpoints set up in every locked-down alley to deliver necessities to isolated households and the outer layer involved health checkpoints to measure the body temperature and record the information of everyone entering and leaving the alleys.

Using the model, the district locked down the source of the disease but did not impact the local daily life and production and business.

Along with the above measures, the district considered dealing with the pandemic outbreak a top priority task, said Kiên.

Hà Nội’s Health Department director Trần Thị Nhị Hà said: “Đông Anh’s 'three-layer' model was very creative and suitable for the local reality.”

“Hà Nội is conducting research and replicating the model to other localities in the city to effectively control the disease outbreak in the capital,” Hà said.

Chairman of Hà Nội People’s Committee Chu Ngọc Anh said Đông Anh District has taken measures to implement the model methodically, scientifically, creatively, timely, effectively, appropriately, successfully and in accordance with the pandemic developments.

“The district concretised the (PM's) directives into drastic and effective solutions in the right spirit of calmness, proactiveness, effectiveness and synchronisation," the chairman said.

Pooled testing 

On Monday, Đà Nẵng City’s CDC received the PM’s Certificate of Merit for its efforts in tracing and testing COVID-19 patients.

Since the pandemic outbreak last year, the city’s CDC has made constant efforts in early detection and rapid localisation to zone the source of the disease in the community.

The work of testing, monitoring and handling of COVID-19 cases has been recognised and appreciated.

This was also the first unit in the country to successfully deploy the pooled testing method.

The pooled testing method of five samples reduced testing costs to nearly VNĐ12 billion (US$520,385) from VNĐ55.4 billion ($2.4 million) of single-sample testing for the same number of samples, according to the city’s People’s Committee.

The method helped to test more people and save time. The statistics showed that during 16 days from August 8 to 23, 2020, the number of people who had samples taken for testing hit 97,103.

This year, facing the third pandemic wave with extremely complicated developments and pressure to test more samples in difficult conditions of human and material resources, the centre improved the method of five-sample pooled testing into 10-sample pooled testing.

The method has not only cut testing costs by 20 times but also helped speed up the testing process due to limited equipment and human resources as well as quickly detect new cases in the community.

Since May 1 up to now, nearly 70,000 test samples have been carried out by the Đà Nẵng CDC with test results required within 24 hours to keep up with the speed of tracing and large-scale surveillance.

Some days the centre receives nearly 22,000 samples. VNS