Vietnam reports first new COVID-19 cases in two months

Vietnam’s government announced Thursday the first local transmissions of the coronavirus in the country in almost two months.

The New York Times reports that Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc has called on two northern provinces to close their borders in order to prevent people from leaving after 82 new infections were reported. The Vietnamese government has said some of the cases may be related to the more infectious strain of the coronavirus first identified in the United Kingdom.

Vietnam has been relatively successful in handling COVID-19, the Times reports, having tallied about 1,500 cases and 35 deaths before this recent outbreak.

The timing of the new cases is problematic as it coincides with Vietnam’s biggest holiday, the Lunar New Year. The ruling Communist Party will also be meeting in the capital city of Hanoi this week to select its new leaders.

In the province of Hai Duong, all 72 of the people who tested positive reportedly work at the same electronics factory. The first worker to test positive apparently had contact with a person who afterward traveled to Japan, where they tested positive for the U.K. coronavirus strain.

The 10 other cases, the Times reports, seem to have stemmed from a worker at Van Don International Airport in the province of Quang Ninh who was in charge of taking arriving passengers into quarantine.

Southeast and East Asian countries are considered to have handled the pandemic exceptionally well in the beginning. Health experts in the region have cited their countries’ experiences with the SARS outbreak of 2008 as reason for their adept handling of outbreaks.