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Lockdown in Vietnam

Last Saturday, Hanoi became the latest Vietnam city to enter lockdown as Covid cases surge. The restrictions in the capital, coupled with a recent shutdown of southern provinces, means about a third of the nation’s 100 million population is now under stay-at-home orders. For weeks, the government has been struggling to contain outbreaks—with little success. On 26 July, the country surpassed 100,000 Covid cases. Nearly all of those infections took place since late April, with exponential growth in recent days. On 1 July, there were 486 new infections. Barely three weeks later, the health ministry reported nearly 8,000 cases.

While every nation in Southeast Asia is struggling to contain outbreaks of the fast-moving Delta variant, Vietnam stands in stark contrast simply by dint of how well it had done for most of the pandemic. Early lockdowns, border closures and quarantine requirements resulted in one of the lowest case rates in the world. But a slow response coupled with a badly botched vaccine rollout seems to have undone much of Vietnam’s progress in battling the coronavirus.

To understand how this happened, we spoke with Ho Chi Minh City-based journalist Michael Tatarski, the editor in chief of Saigoneer, an English-language online publication, and author of the newsletter Vietnam Weekly.

For much of the pandemic Vietnam was a glowing success story, with a rigorous public health response that was well-received and followed by the public. Is the situation now simply a reflection of the impossibility to contain the Delta variant, or did the government make missteps along the way?

Part of the current situation is certainly down to the difficulty of Delta, but it also seems that officials (and the general public) thought that the steps which served Vietnam so well for the first 18 months of the pandemic would continue to work, and that simply hasn’t been the case.

There were also some questionable decisions in hindsight, such as letting the 30 April (Reunification Day) and 1 May (Labour Day) holiday weekend go on with minimal restrictions when we knew there were cases in the north, as well as holding in-person high school graduation exams nationwide, involving something like 1 million people nationwide, when numerous provinces had high caseloads. There has been a bad combination of Delta’s ruthlessness and some amount of over-confidence, or perhaps complacency, after Vietnam was spared the worst for so long.

What’s the scene now as cases continue to rise? Are people following lockdowns and health directives this time around, or are there signs of discontent?

Here in Ho Chi Minh City, daily life is unrecognisable. I’ve only left my neighbourhood twice in three weeks, and that was to deliver food to friends who couldn’t leave their apartment due to a positive case on their floor. Most people are certainly following the rules, which are extremely strict—people have been fined for walking their dog, for going for a run and for driving to another district to shop for groceries—but compliance isn’t 100 per cent. As with anywhere in the world, people are people, and some aren’t going to play by the rules.

In spite of surging Covid cases, Vietnam remains at the bottom of Asean in terms of vaccination rates. What accounts for the slow procurement and rollout of the vaccines?

This is probably the biggest question right now. To be sure, many countries are struggling to source vaccine doses, and countries like the US deserve criticism for how many doses they are sitting on. But at the same time, Vietnam’s position at the bottom regionally is pretty shocking—there are domestic vaccines in development, and it’s not clear whether the government thought they had enough time to wait for those, but they took far too long to start placing orders and negotiating with foreign producers like Pfizer.

Some of the regional gap is because countries like Cambodia have received huge shipments of Chinese vaccines, which is politically complicated here in Vietnam, but even administering what has arrived is slow: around 12 million doses have been delivered to Vietnam (mostly AstraZeneca and Moderna), but well under 5 million doses have actually gone into arms. One health official said that at this rate it will take 40 months to vaccinate 70 per cent of the population. That will obviously accelerate as more doses arrive, but this is a really bad position for Vietnam to be in.

 

From the archives

Teochew opera

Ken Kwek

The biography of Low Bee Mui should be written in at least three languages but can only be rendered in one.

She was a Teochew from Guangdong province and grew up in the port city of Swatow. Bee Mui’s father was an uneducated fisherman, her mother an uneducated breeder of children. Bee Mui had four older brothers and two younger sisters, only one of whom she would see again after leaving China for good.

On June 19, 1939, two days before Japanese forces invaded Swatow, Bee Mui boarded a steamship with little more than the clothes on her back and a hastily procured letter proving she was the wife of a wealthy heûng kêh—an immigrant trader who’d made his fortune in British Singapore. The agreement between Bee Mui’s father and the trader, a first cousin, was that Bee Mui would be delivered to him when she turned fifteen. But the coming of the Japanese necessitated that the pact be sealed a year in advance.

Read more here

 

Tune in:

Educators, or simply keen readers, might enjoy Teaching Southeast Asian Literature: A Roundtable and Conversation. Hosted by the Southeast Asia and Southeast Asia Diasporic Forum of the Modern Language Association, this free online panel discussion brings together an excellent roster of professors to discuss their approach to teaching some of the region’s finest modern writers. The talk will take place 27 July, 9:00 p.m.

 

 

 

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