Second coronavirus patient in Vietnam has been discharged from hospital

A Chinese man who was one of the first infection cases of the new coronavirus in Vietnam has been discharged from a Saigon hospital.

Li Zichao, 28, was released from Cho Ray Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City on Tuesday morning.

He has been tested negative for the nCoV four times since January 27, four days after he was confirmed to carry the nCoV.

His health is now in complete normal state, Nguyen Tri Thuc, the hospital’s director, said.

But Zichao wants to continue staying at the hospital to take care of his father, who is also infected and is still under treatment.

“I would like to express my gratitute to doctors and nurses that have willingly treated me. They have not just cured me but taken care of me mentally and created conditions for me to stay and look after my father,” Zichao said at ceremony to celebrate his discharge.

Zichao and his father Li Ding, 66, are the first two infection cases of the new Wuah pnenomina in Vietnam.

Ding arrived in Hanoi from Wuhan City, the epicenter of the epidemic, in Hubei Province, on January 13, before proceeding to Nha Trang in the central province of Khanh Hoa.

Zichao, who had resided in Long An Province for the previous four months, went to visit him in Nha Trang. Both of them traveled to Saigon and the neighboring Long Anlater. Ding developed a fever on January 17, and Zichao followed suit on January 20. Both were admitted to the Cho Ray Hospital and tested positive on January 23.

Le Quoc Hung, the dean of the hospital’s tropical diasease department, said the father is recovering well and his health is now in stable condition.

Treatment varies from place to place based on each patient’s situation, he said.

As for Ding, doctors have had to run tests and keep track of his situation each day to make suitable adjustments because he has different ailments including diabetes, hypertension and coronary insufficiency, apart from an operation for lung cancer.

Phan Trong Lan, head of the Pasteur Institute in HCMC, said which could be considered a good news is that 28 people that have in contact with the two patients in the city have all passed the quarantine period without signs of having caught the virus, and all doctors and nurses directly treating the two patients do not have any symptomps of infection.

Doctors at Cho Ray said previously they had applied methods that have not been recommended by the World Health Organization to treat Zichao, including sending him to the hospital’s rooftop every morning for sunlight and outdoor exercise, quarantining him in the room with windows kept opened to receive natural air and sunlight and ensure warm indoor temperature to weaken the virus, and making him gargle every day with an antiseptic solution.

Zichao made the second nCoV infection case in Vietnam that has been discharged from hospital so far.

The first one is Vietnamese woman Nguyen Thu Trang, 25, a native of Thanh Hoa Province in north central Vietnam, who was discharged on Monday.

Vietnam has confirmed ninth infection case of the virus, which has killed 427 people and infected more than 20,600 as of Tuesday morning.

He was among a group of eight workers returning from work training in Wuhan on January 17.

Four of them had tested positive for the nCoV and three are under treatment. The other, a native in Thanh Hoa Province, was discharged from the provincial general hospital on Monday after doctors declared her free of the new coronavirus.

Other confirmed cases in Vietnam are a Vietnamese-American who transited in Wuhan en route to Vietnam and a hotel receptionist who caught the coronavirus infection from Li Ding and Li Zichao in Nha Trang.

Source: Vnexpress