How Vietnam pulled off a coronavirus miracle

Vietnam looked like a coronavirus disaster story waiting to happen. The country shares a long border and close economic links with China. A third of its 97 million inhabitants live in tightly-packed urban centres. Its hospitals are overcrowded and underfunded. And the Wuhan outbreak came just before the lunar new year and an accompanying influx of Chinese tourists.

But against all the odds Vietnam has recorded just 349 coronavirus infections as of June 23 and only 25 cases in the last month. The number of reported deaths is – astonishingly – zero. The key to its success has been a strange mixture of diligent pre-emption and naked authoritarianism. Even so, the rest of the world should take note.

I flew to Vietnam on March 9 for an ill-advised holiday, catching one of the last flights into the country before all tourist visas were suspended. The first wave of coronavirus cases was building momentum and I arrived in a country tangibly on edge.

Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party had taken decisive early action to prevent the spread of the virus. In mid-January, before the first confirmed case within its borders, the government, recognising that if the disease gained traction it could overrun the country’s fragile health sector, chose to concentrate all its efforts on prevention.

Drawing on its experience tackling the SARS epidemic in 2003 and periodic outbreaks of swine flu, a massive public awareness campaign was set in motion, with personalised text messages, viral hand washing jingles and patriotic posters combining to get the message across. Health checkpoints were set up on main roads and border crossings as part of a programme of mass testing.

On February 1, against WHO advice, all inbound flights from China, Macau and Hong Kong were cancelled and Vietnam started to shut its land border with China – a bold move which snubbed its mighty neighbour and biggest trading partner. I had to sign a health declaration upon arrival which threatened me with prosecution if the information I gave was false. As Cheltenham Festival was in full swing back home, lucrative tourist hubs such as Ha Long Bay and the mountainous northern region of Sa Pa were being closed to visitors.

Businesses were shutting down across the country, and with the virus running riot in northern Italy, Europeans were being treated with extreme caution. Finding a restaurant that would serve me or a hostel that would take me became increasingly difficult. Patrons would look me up and down and shoo me away as I approached. Children would cover their mouths with their hands when they passed in the street and run away in only half-joking terror (face masks had been made compulsory but I had read that they didn’t work and dismissed them as a cultural quirk). Now, three months later, it is illegal not to wear one on a bus in England.

Draconian early measures have paid dividends but the authoritarian flavour of the Vietnamese success story can’t be ignored. I heard versions of a similar tale wherever I went: if someone was found to be infected they would immediately be taken to a rudimentary quarantine facility. Anyone they had come into contact with would be traced and local authorities would lock down the hotels or residences they had been staying in, with nobody allowed to leave for at least two weeks, whether or not they showed symptoms.

This is part of the government’s comprehensive – and hugely labour intensive – track and trace system. Social media data harvesting, phone tracking and video surveillance have all been harnessed – the same tools with which the government suppresses internal dissent.

Intrusive state monitoring has been used in conjunction with standing armies of neighbourhood security officers patrolling city blocks which, as Bill Hayton and Tro Ly Ngheo report in Foreign Policy, “can be augmented by militia and self-defence forces with the ability to seal off entire districts.” Tens of thousands of people have been forcibly quarantined in camps since the start of the pandemic.

These methods temper the praise that can reasonably be given to the Communist Party. But the impressive results are not in question. The official figures have inevitably raised eyebrows and the government has been accused of massaging the figures, as China is almost certain to have done.

However, as the BBC has reported, independent monitoring has corroborated the government’s data. The results of the team led by Professor Guy Thwaites, director of Oxford University Clinical Research Unit (OUCRU), based in Ho Chi Minh City, is consistent with official figures.

I managed to catch a flight out of the capital at the end of March, just before the nationwide lockdown and blanket travel ban were announced. But Vietnam’s lockdown was pre-emptive rather than reactive, and on April 23, after just three weeks, the country was opening up again.

Vietnam hasn’t escaped the economic impact of the virus. As many as 10.3 million Vietnamese will become unemployed or see their income shrink in the second quarter of 2020, according to an International Labour Organisation (ILO) report. Even so, the IMF still predicts the economy will grow by 2.7% this year.

With a second wave of coronavirus predicted and fresh outbreaks already erupting in China, Germany and South Korea, it’s not too late for the rest of the world to learn lessons from Vietnam even if the more authoritarian elements of its response can’t and shouldn’t be replicated. The fact that an apparent over-reaction saved the country from disaster brings into sharp focus mistakes made elsewhere and the necessity of a rapid, concerted response, wherever the virus rears its head.