Hanoi shares Covid-19 response experience with world cities

Meeting participants included mayors of 42 cities worldwide, including London (UK), Maryland (US), Jakarta (Indonesia), Bilbao (Spain), Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Ankara (Turkey), Seoul (Republic of Korea) and Montreal (Canada).

The meeting was an initiative of Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon. In his opening speech, he emphasized that cities worldwide are facing a crisis resulting from the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, which threatens people’s lives and the existence of cities. He expressed his wish to build a cooperation network among cities worldwide to share experience and join hands in taking timely action to cope with new communicable diseases.

Sharing the capital city’s experience, Nguyen Duc Chung said that Hanoi quickly traced people who had possible contact with COVID-19 patients. All those found to have had direct contacts were quarantined at designated facilities, while those with indirect contacts were quarantined at home under the close monitoring of grassroots health clinics. In addition to rapid response and contact tracing, Hanoi has provided information about the epidemic publicly and transparently via different means of communication, and developed the Hanoi Smartcity app to monitor those in quarantine, he added.