HANOI – Vietnam has switched its target in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic from controlling infections to controlling serious cases and deaths only, while heading to remove the disease from its “especially dangerous” list.

The approach has been specified in a government resolution issued Thursday about COVID-19 prevention and control work in 2022 and 2023.

Vietnam’s overarching goal in the period is to ensure effective disease control, protect the life and health of the people, minimize the number of serious illnesses and deaths caused by disease, and enable economic recovery and development, the document said.

Thanks to high vaccination coverage, the death number in Vietnam has been decreasing in recent months. In the past week, though new infections rose 16 percent to over 171,400 cases per day on average, fatalities declined by 14 percent to 75 cases, according to data from its health ministry. As of Thursday, over 201 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines had been administered to a population of about 98 million.

Based on the real situation, the country will consider delisting COVID-19 as a Class A infectious disease, the list of diseases that are classified as “especially dangerous,” and to view it as just a “dangerous” infectious disease.

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In April 2020, the Vietnamese government declared COVID-19 a national epidemic, listing it as a Class A infectious disease.