A man from Tien Giang Province in southern Vietnam resorted to jumping into a river when law enforcers tried to catch him for exercising outdoors, which is currently prohibited as the Mekong Delta province has been placed under strict social distancing over COVID-19.

Tien Giang Province has come into extensive social distancing under the prime minister’s Directive No. 16 from Monday, after detecting more than 400 local coronavirus cases.

Functional forces in the province have since patrolled the streets to prevent people from going outside unnecessarily.

On Tuesday, the patrol teams had to deal with several cases of people exercising and fishing at the parks on the embankments of the Tien River.

Some of them ran away when seeing the officers approaching.

In one noticeable case, a man even jumped into the river to flee the scene, according to the camera footage of an officer on duty.

As he managed to swim far away, the patrol officer decided to give up chasing him.

Authorities in Tien Giang fined a total of 20 cases for violating COVID-19 prevention regulations, including not wearing face masks in public and trading non-essential goods, on the first two days of the ongoing 14-day social distancing drive.

Vietnam has been battling a new outbreak with 31,890 local infections recorded in 58 out of 63 provinces and cities since April 27.

Tien Giang has logged 470 infections in this round.

Ho Chi Minh City is currently the hardest-hit locality with 17,239 cases.

The country has confirmed an accumulation of 35,409 infections, including 33,460 community cases, since the pathogen first hit it early last year, according to the health ministry’s data.

Recoveries have risen to 9,553 whereas the death toll has reached 132.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!