"We have evacuated more than 174,000 households, which is equivalent to
more than 600,000 people," an official report by Vietnam's flood and storm control department said Sunday.
The storm is expected to strike on Monday morning after changing course
prompting mass evacuations in northern Nghe An province around 230 kilometres (145 miles) from the captial Hanoi, the update said.
However, many of the estimated 200,000 evacuated in four central provinces on Saturday have been allowed to return to their homes.
Haiyan "is quickly moving north and northwest, travelling at a speed of up to 35 kilometres per hour", the country's weather bureau added in a statement.
The weather system -- one of the most intense typhoons on record when it
tore into the Philippines -- has weakened over the South China Sea and is expected to hit as a weaker category 1 storm, meteorologists added.
Comment: Update 10 November 2013:
The wind speed was not recorded at 395km/h, as we previously reported. At least, we have found no independent confirmation of that. Instead it appears that some broadcasters such as the BBC mistakenly translated 235km/h into '235mph' and the storm suddenly became something bigger than it actually was.
Anthony Watts has more on this here.
Nevertheless, the storm does appear to have wrought severe destruction on another defenceless country whose leaders are more concerned with appeasing the CEO Gods of Multinational Corporations than developing infrastructure to mitigate Nature's forces and improve the people's well-being.