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Vietnam May Have the Most Effective Response to Covid-19
They’ve done it through mass mobilization of the health care system, public employees, and the security forces, combined with an energetic and creative public education campaign.
By George Black
(https://www.thenation.com/article/world/coronavirus-vietnam-quarantine-mobilization/)

Since the earliest days of the Covid-19 pandemic, three Asian countries have been singled out for praise for their effective response. First, it was South Korea. The country has a population of 52 million, and as of April 22 it has 10,702 cases and 240 deaths. Taiwan has drawn a lot of media attention because of its spiky relationship with the World Health Organization, and, with 24 million people, its numbers are much better than South Korea’s: 427 cases and only six deaths. Singapore, finally, with a population of 5.5 million, has 11,178 cases and 12 fatalities, and was held up as a model until last week, which brought a new surge that appears to have begun in a hostel for South Asian migrant workers.

The glaring omission from this list is Vietnam. Almost three months since its first case was detected on January 23, the number of recorded infections has inched up to only 268, and so far no one has died. The population of Vietnam is 95 million—more than South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore combined.

Yet Vietnam has received very little attention in the American press. If we take The New York Times as a yardstick, other than brief pickups of shorts from Reuters, the only substantial story was a piece—six weeks ago—about the impact of Covid-19 on the fashion industry. This was centered on a 27-year-old socialite named Nga Nguyen, who attended a Gucci fashion show in Milan and a St. Laurent event in Paris in late February, then lied about her travel itinerary on the mandatory health reporting form when she returned to Vietnam. She received a positive diagnosis in early March, having infected her sister and seven other passengers on her flight. The daughter of a steel magnate, she has been reviled in Vietnam ever since as a symbol of the country’s arrogant and over-entitled nouveaux riches.

The painstaking April 11 analysis by the Times of what the Trump administration knew about the novel coronavirus and when it knew it, what expert advice it received and ignored, and when it finally acted once the horse was out of the barn, is a useful template for reconstructing a chronology of how Vietnam has responded.

Like many Asian countries, it had a psychological head start. Vietnam had one of the first cases of SARS in 2003, and was praised for its quick and successful handling of the outbreak. The region was traumatized by SARS, and mask-wearing became commonplace in many countries. I vividly remember my consternation when I checked into a hotel in Taipei some years ago to find that all of the receptionists lined up behind the reception desk were masked. In the case of Covid-19, Vietnam was also predictably on higher alert than most other countries because of its land border with China and the large amount of travel between the two countries, both business- and tourist-related.

Vietnam’s approach was never based on mass testing, which has been the panicky and inadequate response of the United States and most other Western countries. And this was not because its resources were limited; it was a deliberate preemptive strategy to minimize infections. The gross number of tests—about 175,000 so far—is the wrong yardstick to use. What is significant is the ratio of tests to confirmed cases, and that ratio in Vietnam is almost five times greater than in any other country. Testing was followed by strict contact tracing (including secondary contacts) for anyone known to be infected, immediate isolation followed by quarantining, and the prompt creation of a real-time database and two mobile apps by which people could record their health status and symptoms. All this was backed up by the mass mobilization of the country’s military, public security forces, the health care system, and public employees, and an energetic and creative public education campaign that included TV cartoons, social media, and posters that draw on the traditional iconography of official propaganda but replaced heroic workers and peasants with heroic doctors in face masks.

Read more at https://www.thenation.com/article/world/coronavirus-vietnam-quarantine-mobilization/