How is Vietnam fighting against Corona
Being a developing country and also a socialist country, Vietnam is different comparing to the western developed countries in several aspects:
- Vietnam understands that it does not have resources to cope with disease explosion at large scale (but I doubt if any country has).
- The healthcare system is mostly public. Private healthcare is growing but still small. This means that the government has significant influence in the system including resource allocation. The treatment could be localized to avoid overload at central level.
- Vietnam has extensive network on preventive public health, which is present at every commune in the country.
- Vietnam has extensive so-called mass organisations like women, youth associations, as well as relatively strong local government including presence of local police.
- Military is built-up as people army, which means that one of their mandates is to be involved in such kind of situation. They are well prepared for this, and in fact they have mobilized significant resource in the last few weeks to provide quarantine for nearly 30000 people including those coming from high risk areas in China, Korea and Europe.
- Vietnam is “less democratic” from the view of western standard. But the positive side of that, it is also much faster in term of decision making and resource mobilization.
- Public awareness in Vietnam is high, and the government and media (again, mostly state-controlled) have done a good job in raising the awareness and communicating on needed actions.
- Vietnam manages to invest in fairly acceptable biotech R&D capacity. Together with China and Korea, it is among the first few countries that could develop Covid-19 test kit at commercial scale within a month- This really makes US scandal on Covid-19 test kit, as well as shortage of testing capacity in some developed countries really a shame. Hope that Vietnam capacity on vaccine development will bring some good results within a year too.
Vietnam started early and declared a “war on virus” (ch?ng d?ch nh? ch?ng gi?c) on January 27, 2020 or just 4 days after the first positive case detected. So the country was doing relatively well in the first phase of epidemic despite proximity to China and extensive exposure to China and Korea. Last year, over 50% of international travel, or more than 9 million tourists coming from 2 countries along. They are also 2 biggest economic partners for Vietnam.
In the last few days, Vietnam sees dramatic rise of new confirmed cases (from 16 on March 6, to 47 on March 13). Most of the cases are related to European travel, few are related to Korea or US).
Fingers crossed that Vietnam could still control new wave of infection until summer (weather is an important factor). But people are getting more worried if we will be able to do so.