Nearly 9,500 employees in 35 cities and provinces have contracted Covid-19, accounting for over 31 percent of total infections, Nguyen Dinh Khang, chairman of the Vietnam General Confederation of Labor, said Wednesday.

Some 60,000 workers have had close contacts with Covid patients, he added.

The confederation has provided urgent assistance worth VND113 billion ($4.9 million) to over 193,000 employees. The confederation has encouraged enterprises to buy Covid-19 vaccines for their workers.

Predicting that the number of affected workers would increase, Khang said sectors and localities should speed up the implementation of the VND26 trillion state-funded aid package.

HCMC, the current Covid-19 epicenter, has 1.6 million workers in industrial parks and export processing zones. The southern provinces of Dong Nai and Binh Duong have 1.2 million and one million employees, respectively. The three localities make up around one-fourth the total number of workers nationwide.

According to statistics from the HCM City Labor Confederation, as of July 7, over 1,800 workers in the city had been infected with SARS-CoV-2. Footwear maker Pouyuen Vietnam, the biggest employer in the city with 56,000 workers, had to cease operations for 10 days starting Tuesday.

Another footwear maker, Pouchen Vietnam, located in Dong Nai, has let nearly 17,000 workers stop working for 14 days. In late May, the northern province of Bac Giang closed down four industrial parks, affecting nearly 140,000 employees.