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HANOI (Reuters) – Vietnam has made a total effort to save the life of its most serious novel coronavirus patient, a British pilot who works for Vietnam Airlines, the national airline.
Through aggressive testing and a massive centralized quarantine program, the Southeast Asian country has kept its coronavirus case count at only 288 and has reported no deaths.
Few expenses have been spared to try to save the life of the 43-year-old man, identified only as “Patient 91”, who caught the coronavirus in a bar in the southern Ho Chi Minh City shopping center in mid-March, been informed media
More than 4,000 people connected to the group were tested, and 18 were found to be infected with the coronavirus.
While most have recovered, the British pilot is on life support and his condition has deteriorated significantly.
On Tuesday, the health ministry held a meeting with experts from the best hospitals and decided that the only way to save the man’s life was with a lung transplant.
Her case has generated national interest in Vietnam, where the government has won wide support for her campaign to contain the coronavirus.
On Thursday, state media said 10 people, including a 70-year-old military veteran, had volunteered as lung donors but had been rejected by state doctors.
“We are touched by your good intentions, but current regulations do not allow us to transplant lungs donated by the majority of living people,” a representative from the Vietnam National Coordinating Center for Human Organ Transplantation (VNHOT) told the Tuoi Tre newspaper.
The patient has only 10% of his lung capacity left and has been on life support for more than 30 days, Tuoi Tre said.
Deputy health minister Nguyen Truong Son told the media last month that Vietnam had imported specialized drugs from abroad to treat blood clots in the patient, but to no avail.
Vietnam has spent more than 5 billion dong ($ 200,000) trying to save it, the Vietnam News Agency (VNA) reported.
In March, Chinese state media said that it had successfully performed a double lung transplant on a patient with coronavirus, a procedure that it described as an important method of treating victims most affected by the disease.
Vietnam hopes to capitalize on its success in fighting the coronavirus by positioning itself as a safe place to do business, as international manufacturers seek to diversify their supply chains outside of China.
(Reports by James Pearson; Additional reports by Khanh Vu and Phuong Nguyen; Edition by Robert Birsel)
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