Tough on COVID

HANOI--Vietnam jailed a man on Monday for five years for breaking strict COVID-19 quarantine rules and spreading the virus to others, state media reported.

Le Van Tri, 28, was convicted of “spreading dangerous infectious diseases” at a one-day trial at the People’s Court of the southern province of Ca Mau, the state-run Vietnam News Agency (VNA) reported.

Vietnam has been one of the world’s coronavirus success stories, thanks to targeted mass testing, aggressive contact tracing, tight border restrictions and strict quarantine. But new clusters of infections since late April have tarnished that record.

“Tung traveled back to Ca Mau from Ho Chi Minh City... and breached the 21-day quarantine regulations,” the news agency said.

“Tung infected eight people, one of whom died due to the virus after one month of treatment,” it added.

While on COVID:  there seems to be some online fighting going on about whether that Bangladesh study into the effect of mask wearing is really a well designed and statistically convincing one, or not.  I read this guy's take on the matter and I am inclined to think it is significant.   And yeah, even though the effect was only to reduce infections by 10%, in context:

While the effect may seem small, the results offer a glimpse of just how much masks matter, Mobarak said.

"A 30-percent increase in mask-wearing led to a 10 percent drop in Covid, so imagine if there was a 100-percent increase — if everybody wore a mask and we saw a 100-percent change," he said.

And:

The study’s authors — led by principal investigators Abaluck, Laura Kwong, Steve Luby, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak and Ashley Styczynski — a globe-spanning team that includes researchers from Yale, Stanford and the Bangladeshi nonprofit GreenVoice, emphasized that this did not mean masks were only 9.3 percent effective.

“I think a big error would be to read this study and to say, ‘Oh, masks can only prevent 10 percent of symptomatic infections,’ ” Abaluck said. The number would probably be several times higher if masking were universal, he said.

Yeah, seems to me to be good evidence for mandating mask wearing, at least in some scenarios.  (Schools, I would expect.)

HANOI--Vietnam jailed a man on Monday for five years for breaking strict COVID-19 quarantine rules and spreading the virus to others, state media reported.

Le Van Tri, 28, was convicted of “spreading dangerous infectious diseases” at a one-day trial at the People’s Court of the southern province of Ca Mau, the state-run Vietnam News Agency (VNA) reported.

Vietnam has been one of the world’s coronavirus success stories, thanks to targeted mass testing, aggressive contact tracing, tight border restrictions and strict quarantine. But new clusters of infections since late April have tarnished that record.

“Tung traveled back to Ca Mau from Ho Chi Minh City... and breached the 21-day quarantine regulations,” the news agency said.

“Tung infected eight people, one of whom died due to the virus after one month of treatment,” it added.