Ho Chi Minh City officials have close down local massage parlors, saunas, cinemas, theaters, and online game centers since 6:00 pm on Monday in the latest move to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

The close-down decision was announced by chairman of the municipal People’s Committee Nguyen Thanh Phong during a meeting on Monday morning.

Aside from the temporary closure of more non-essential businesses and services, chairman Phong required all residents to fill in health declaration forms as they return to the metropolis following a four-day holiday marking Reunification Day (April 30) and International Workers’ Day (May 1).

Those who fail to fill in health declarations or state false information in these forms will be sternly punished.

Relevant bodies will continue carrying out patrols and penalizing people for failure to wear face masks in public.

Managers of local quarantine facilities must take strict measures to prevent transmission within these venues.

The risk of a new COVID-19 outbreak in the city is very high, especially when people are rushing back after the holiday, which started on Friday, Phong assessed.

He stated that seminars and conferences should be canceled if they are not urgent.

The number of participants in religious ceremonies must be limited depending on the scale and significance of each event.

Karaoke parlors, bars, and discos in Ho Chi Minh City were previously closed from 6:00 pm last Friday until further notice.

The metropolis detected one community-based COVID-19 infection on Thursday last week, a 28-year-old man who had had direct contact with another patient in the northern province of Ha Nam before heading to the southern city earlier the same week.

Vietnam has recorded 2,962 infections as of Monday afternoon, with 2,549 recoveries and 35 deaths, according to the Ministry of Health's statistics.

Twenty-four domestic cases have been recorded in the country since April 29.

Ho Chi Minh City has documented 260 patients so far, of whom 233 have recovered.

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