Nearly 150,000 students in Vietnam’s COVID-19 hotspot return to school

HO CHI MINH CITY: DEC. 13 – Nearly 150,000 students from 9th and 12th grades in Vietnam’s southern Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), the country’s largest COVID-19 hotspot, returned to school on Monday after a long time of learning online due to pandemic restrictions.

Students of such grades who test positive for COVID-19, live in high-risk areas and are not staying in the city at the moment, will continue to study online in accordance with guidelines of the city’s health sector, Vietnam News Agency reported.

HCMC is home to 205 high schools, of which 176 would welcome 12th graders back. Meanwhile, as many as 224 secondary schools out of the total 286 in the southern city would open to 9th graders.

Under a pilot program, the city will hold in-person classes for 9th and 12th graders from Monday until Dec. 25, before allowing more students to come back to school.

Between late October and early December, the southern city finished inoculating more than 709,600 children aged 12-17 years old, according to the municipal center for disease control.

HCMC is now Vietnam’s largest COVID-19 hotspot with nearly 488,000 infections and 18,750 deaths as of Sunday, according to the data from the country’s Ministry of Health.

-Xinhua