Temporal considerations in the 2021 COVID-19 lockdown of Ho Chi Minh City

Plan, E. L. C. V. M.; Le, H. T.; Le, M. D.; Phan, H.

The success of Vietnam in controlling the spread of COVID-19 hinges on a timely implementation of its coherent strategy of containment and rapid tracing and testing efforts. The Vietnamese living in Mekong Delta are currently being besieged by the SARS-Cov-2 Delta variant as they undergo several and extended levels of lockdown. In this work we examine the temporal aspects of the lockdown in Ho Chi Minh City and predict the progress of the outbreak in terms of the total number of confirmed cases. A compartmental model with containment is fit to data to estimate the rate of transmission in Ho Chi Minh City. The severity of the lockdown is estimated from publicly-available data on mobility and coupled to the rate of infection. Various scenarios on when to begin a lockdown and its duration are assessed. This report, dated 27 July 2021, supports a lockdown of at least 3 weeks and predicts that there could be half as many cases had the inevitable lockdown started a week earlier.