He Gave COVID to 8 People, Will Be Jailed for 5 Years

A 28-year-old Vietnamese man infected eight people with COVID-19, and has now been put behind bars as a result. Authorities say Le Van Tri returned to the city of Ca Mau after having traveled to Ho Chi Minh City, and did not quarantine for the three weeks required by law, Reuters reports. One of the people he infected with the coronavirus died after battling COVID for a month, authorities say. Vietnam has strict quarantine rules, and has sentenced two other people to suspended jail terms for the same charge of "spreading dangerous infectious diseases" on which Tri was convicted after a one-day trial.

After initially having been considered a success story of COVID containment, Vietnam has been struggling with a worsening fourth-wave outbreak since late April due to the delta variant. When the wave started, just 35 people in the entire country had died of COVID. Ho Chi Minh City is now the virus epicenter, having logged almost 260,000 COVID cases and 10,685 deaths, a large portion of the country's 13,385 total deaths so far. "Everyone is struggling to survive. If they don’t have COVID already, they struggle to have food," a man who grew up in Ho Chi Minh City, and has lost four family members who still lived there to COVID, tells Al Jazeera. The city has been in lockdown since last month. (More COVID-19 stories.)