The 115 Emergency Center has had to increase the number of lines tenfold to 40 to serve the surge in calls, said Nguyen Duy Long, director of the center, explaining that before the latest Covid-19 outbreak, there were on average 1,200 calls a day.

As of August 2, 89 percent of the calls were responded to, 10 percent were missed calls and 1 percent were prank calls, Long said.

The center, which has 200 employees, targets responding to all the calls it receives, he added.

Meanwhile, the HCMC Department of Health has mobilized 200 taxis to transfer Covid-19 patients and is planning to have an additional 100 ambulances on duty as the number of Covid-19 patients exceeded 105,000.

As of Wednesday, HCMC hospitals were treating 33,444 Covid-19 patients, 1,050 of whom were on ventilators.