Erin Doherty
AXIOS
Residents wait to provide swab samples for Covid-19 testing along a street in Hanoi on August 18, 2021 amid a two-week lockdown. Photo: Nhac Nguyen/AFP via Getty Images
A Vietnamese man on Monday was jailed for five years for breaking the country’s COVID-19 quarantine rules and spreading the virus, Reuters reports.
Driving the news: Le Van Tri, 28, who was convicted of “spreading dangerous infectious diseases,” breached the 21-day quarantine regulations after traveling back to Ca Mau from Ho Chi Minh City, the state-run Vietnam News Agency reported, per Reuters.
- “Tri infected eight people, one of whom died due to the virus after one month of treatment,” state media reported.
- Vietnam has sentenced two other people to 18-month and two-year suspended jail terms on the same charges, Reuters reports.
The big picture: Vietnam had maintained relatively low COVID case numbers due to mass testing, aggressive contact tracing and strict quarantine rules early in the pandemic, per Reuters.
- The country is battling recent surges of the virus, however, and the government has imposed strict lockdowns.
- A worsening COVID outbreak in Vietnam has infected more than 536,000 people and killed 13,385 — the majority of cases happening in the past few months, per Reuters.
Go deeper: Lockdown issued in Hanoi due to COVID-19 surge in Vietnam