Vietnam was quite proud of itself in relation to Covid-19 and I think that there as a very good reason for that pride. As death tolls around the world skyrocketed Vietnam was one of the few countries in the world that was able to keep that number at zero. When faced with their first potential death weeks ago the entire country rallied together to nurse this person back to health even though he was not Vietnamese.
There is some chatter about how the numbers have been fudged and that there actually has been Covid deaths but they were simply labeled as something else, which would be the opposite of what has been stated to happen in Europe and USA, but for an observer that actually lives here, it was pretty clear that they were doing a better job in containment than a lot of the rest of the world was doing.
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Vietnam was (to my knowledge) the only country in the world that wasn't completely ignoring the threat that had returned to "normal." All restaurants and bars were open, people could freely travel (domestically) no one was wearing masks, and even sporting events with thousands of spectators were back in season. Life was good and we were the envy of the world.
Then some people reintroduces the virus to the country. Although there is no definitive evidence of this, it is rumored that a group of Vietnamese smugglers managed to sneak dozens of Chinese nationals illegally into the country and in the interim these people managed to reintroduce the virus to the country. While they are doing their best (I presume, based on what i have seen) to contact trace the person who supposedly introduced the virus back into the country, new cases keep popping up all over the city.
While those case numbers and other stats are a lot higher than they were 8 days ago (it was half that many cases and zero deaths) it really isn't that bad in the global scheme of things.
One thing I do appreciate about the death tally is that the government releases more information per death than just a number of people who have died. Whether it is intentional or not, I don't know (I reckon it is) but the information provided for each person that has died also indicates that 100% of them were already in very poor health and were quite old. One of the people was 100 years old and had multiple, very serious health problems prior to catching Covid.
One bad aspect of a lot of this is that from the contact tracing that has been done it appears as though a vast majority of the cases originated from hospitals and now we are finding that the population is very afraid to seek medical attention that they need. In order to combat this fear the government has set up a a field hospital in a nearby indoor stadium that is reserved exclusively for covid cases.
They set up this field hospital in Da Nang in just 4 days. However, if you look at that picture, there are only 70 or so beds and this might not be enough. Da Nang is also importing medical professionals (domestically) from other provinces as the situation seems to be almost entirely Da Nang specific.
Now, on another note I want to address something that I think is very important. Just a couple of people entering the country were able to infect hundreds in just a short amount of time. I am not a medical professional but it seems to me that this strategy of completely closing yourself off to the rest of the world is not a good long-term strategy.
I don't bother to research it because there is honestly too much information out there that has been infested with politics so we can't really know the truth. I certainly hope there is some truth to the herd immunity process though because once Vietnam gets past this hump, and I believe they will, what comes next? Is Vietnam just going to not let anyone in the country ever again? I suppose we could ask this of every other country in the world as well.
I don't mean to be a Debbie Downer, but this was always going to happen. All of these areas such as New Zealand and Australia and Vietnam who are celebrating their very low infection rate are just as vulnerable as the rest of the world is and if the places that have had high infection rates can achieve that herd immunity that we hear so much about, they are going to be in a much better position to return to normal life in the future.
I think the world is banking entirely too much on a pharmaceutical solution to this.
there is a lot of talk about precisely this going on among the expat community here. I think we are mostly talking about it out of sheer boredom though since our opinion means next to nothing as far as rules are concerned here.
just got locked down again for another 2 weeks.
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STOPdouble digits huh? Well, congratulations if they can keep it that way.
yeah, no kidding. I think the actual number is probably a lot higher but I'm not going to get all worked up about trying to figure that out. I still don't know anyone that knows anyone who has died from Covid or even gotten really sick from it.