HANOI, March 3 (Xinhua) -- The daily COVID-19 tally in Vietnam surged to a new high of 118,790 cases on Thursday, an increase of 8,489 cases from the previous record set on Wednesday, according to the Ministry of Health.
The new infections, logged in 62 localities nationwide, included 118,780 domestically transmitted and 10 imported cases.
Vietnamese capital Hanoi remained the epidemic hotspot with a record 18,661 cases reported on Thursday, followed by the central Nghe An province with 6,152 cases, and the northern Bac Ninh province with 5,648 cases.
Meanwhile, the health authorities also recorded 57,360 COVID-19 cases detected earlier in the northern provinces of Hai Duong and Thai Binh.
The new infections brought the total tally to 3,885,631 with 40,547 deaths in the Southeast Asian country. Nationwide, as many as 2,550,525 COVID-19 patients, or 66 percent of the infections, have so far recovered from the pandemic.
Around 195.7 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered in the country, including 178.9 million shots for people aged 18 and above, said the ministry.
Vietnam has by far gone through four coronavirus waves of increasing scale, complication and infectivity. As of Thursday, it has registered nearly 3.9 million locally transmitted COVID-19 cases since the start of the current wave in April 2021, said the health ministry. ■