A national program to call for cash donations to COVID-19 prevention and control activities by texting kicked off at a ceremony in Hanoi on Thursday.

This text-to-donate program, launched on the National Humanitarian Portal, is jointly conducted by the Vietnam General Confederation of Labor (VGCL), the Vietnam Fatherland Front and the Ministry of Information and Communications.

Donors will simply send a message in the format of “COVID NK” from their mobile phones to number 1408 to make their contributions to Vietnam’s COVID-19 Vaccine Fund.

“N” is any number from 1 to 2,000, and “K” stands for the unit of thousand Vietnam dong. For example, a text message “COVID 20K” means a donation of VND20,000 (US$0.87) to the program.

In this supplied photo, participants of the text-to-donate program launching ceremony are seen sending donation messages from their mobile phones to number 1408 on June 3, 2021.

All the money raised from this program will be delivered to the Vietnam’s COVID-19 Vaccine Fund, National Assembly (NA) Chairman Vuong Dinh Hue said at the ceremony.

Each text-to-donate message shows the spirit of mutual affection towards Vietnamese workers amid the difficult time and contributes to the country’s efforts to drive back the pandemic, the chairman said.

All the donations will be used for the activities related to the COVID-19 prevention and control, with priority given to the purchase of vaccine to inoculate policy beneficiaries, poor people and workers, said VGCL President Nguyen Dinh Khang.

From the beginning of this year, the NA’s Standing Committee and the Government have allocated more than VND13 trillion ($564 million) to the campaign of vaccination against coronavirus, the NA chairman said.

Also at the ceremony, the VGCL started another program named “Vaccines for Workers” through the Labor Golden Heart Fund.

The VGCL warned that the pandemic has not only spread widely in many cities and provinces, especially Bac Giang and Bac Ninh, but has also hit some industrial parks, affecting hundreds of thousands of workers who have their jobs lost or suspended.

Earlier in May, the Ministry of Health expected to buy 150 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine in order to vaccinate about 75 million people out of the country’s population of 98 million at an estimated cost of VND25.2 trillion ($1.1 billion).

Of the total amount, the central budget will allocate about VND16 trillion ($693 million) for this expenditure while the remaining will rely on contributions from businesses and organizations, the Ministry of Finance said.

By Saturday morning, 77 new COVID-19 cases were confirmed nationwide, including 75 domestic infections, the health ministry reported.

The new cases have taken the country’s tally of patients to 8,364, including 3,242 recoveries and 51 deaths, since early 2020.

Among the total figure, 5,249 infections have been documented from April 27, when the pandemic’s fourth wave started in Vietnam, the ministry said.

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