Woolcock Vietnam has contributed a newly published article on COVID-19 in one of the most influencing journals in the world - the Lancet, on March 4th, 2020. The article provided cases report for initial cases in Vinh Phuc and suggest for interventions in Vietnam background. This is one of the earliest publications in Vietnam on the global epidemic of COVID-19. Dr Thu Anh who is a well-known epidemiologist with more than 20 years of experiences in infectious diseases is one of the main authors of this article.

For the full article, please click here.

We will also soon have another article on COVID-19, where we showed that our experiences in TB can be applied into #COVID19 program. More details can be found in this link.

At the same time, members of our research team has been supporting the Vinh Phuc Department of Health in the epidemic response building upon their experience implementing field research and managing data. Within only 2 days in February 2020, when Vinh Phuc was the central point of COVID-19 outbreak, our team has developed a mobile data collection and analysis tool for Vinh Phuc to track and categorize confirmed and contact population. Easily used by individuals' mobile phone, timely updated to a dashboard with key indicators through 3G connection, the data allowed the Department of Health providing timely decision.Later on, the social network analysis was quickly developed to update the contact investigation performance, and allow public health managers to identify potential risk for COVID-19 clusters. The Department of Health showed high appreciation to these tools as it helped to understand the outbreak situation to actively make decisions as well as report to the Ministry of Health.