COVID-19 Field Hospital No. 13 in Ho Chi Minh City is considered the last vestige of the pandemic in Vietnam, and will be shut down to wrap up its treatment role three years after the fight against the novel coronavirus began.

Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper reporters visited the hospital in the city’s outlying district of Binh Chanh on Monday, feeling the silence and emptiness of the facility, which had been crowded and overwhelmed during the peak of the pandemic.

After the pandemic was put under control and no new COVID-19 hospitalizations were recorded, the grass started to grow thick between the rooms there, while some paths in the hospital were submerged by rainwater.

In the yard of the COVID-19 intensive care area stood around 10,000 oxygen cylinders.

Dozens of beds, tables, and notebooks containing the names of patients who died of COVID-19 remain inside each room in the intensive care ward.

The visit finished at the morgue, which had been overloaded with dead bodies during the height of COVID-19, a deadly infectious disease at that time, before they were sent to burning facilities. 

While burning incense to commemorate all patients that had lost their lives to COVID-19, security guard Tran Thanh Tung said that he has worked there since December 2022, when the hospital was handed over to the Ho Chi Minh City Hospital for Tropical Diseases.

“A few months ago, some security guards and self-defense forces caught three individuals red-handed stealing condensing units, and sent them to a nearby police station," Tung said.

He also voiced concerns over the thefts of the hospital’s assets.

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