Commentary: Vietnam defies the odds on COVID-19

PERTH: If you want to see real Olympic-level panic-buying, head to a Vietnamese supermarket a week before Tet, or Lunar New Year.

Yet when the coronavirus broke out in China, Vietnam, with which it shares a border, there was only an hour or two of panic-buying before things settled down to normal.

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Vietnam has come out of COVID-19 lockdown, and schools have restarted after being closed all year. The economy is restarting, and theres hope the country could escape the worst economic ravages, or even benefit from plans to diversify manufacturing away from China.

READ: Commentary: Obviously, we want ASEAN to collaborate better on COVID-19

There are fewer than 300 reported COVID-19 cases, and no reported deaths. International press coverage of Vietnam's efforts has been broad and generally effusive – not something the regime has seen much of for some years.

This is a nation that took three goes just to institute a motorbike helmet law people would actually pay attention to.

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After two failed attempts, the leadership got serious in 2007, although even then citizens were more interested in appearing to follow the law, and the cheaper plastic domes on sale for 50,000 VND (US$2.50) would save riders from a fine but not an injury.

This time, people have listened and are pulling together, wishing to do the right thing rather than simply appearing to do the right thing, which is where the smart moneys been for years.

READ: Commentary: Restrictions on movements in some Southeast Asian countries to fight COVID-19 have been patchy, even scary

INCOMPLETE NUMBERS?

Its often easy to suggest in Vietnam that numbers are incomplete or made up. However, the usual rumour mill is largely quiet.

Reuters recently published a lengthy piece detailing Vietnams efforts, from early border and school closures to sustained contact tracing. The reporters called a dozen funeral homes to check if business is booming. It isnt.

As with elsewhere, numbers have dropped as lockdowns have meant fewer traffic accidents.

It also noted:

These public health experts say Vietnam was successful because it made early, decisive moves to restrict travel into the country, put tens of thousands of people into quarantine and quickly scaled up the use of tests and a system to track down people who might have been exposed to the virus.

On the other hand, the story illustrated a frustrating opacity, with no health officials available for interview.

READ: After aggressive mass testing, Vietnam says it contains COVID-19 outbreak

According to one foreigner whos been in Hanoi since the mid-2000s, “everyone seems in awe of the government”.

Indeed, the often-cynical expats are now praising the nations efforts, grateful they live in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City and not back home, even if they still complain people are putting masks but not helmets on their small children riding pillion.

Vietnams multilingual contact-tracing programme lists all the places each diagnosed patient has been since contracting the virus – down to the addresses, for example, of street-side barbecued eel and noodle joints, after one particular eel-loving patient had picked it up at a St Patricks Day party in Saigon, one of the later virus clusters.

READ: Commentary: Contact tracing holds key to eliminating COVID-19 in post-lockdown New Zealand

FEAR AND NOSTALGIA

The fear in Vietnam in the years since the Doi Moi economic reforms took hold has been that the nation was losing its character, becoming too money-hungry while losing the sense of community and patriotism that enabled the Norths mid-century victories against the French, Americans, and Chinese (although its important to note that the country, which just saw the 45th year anniversary of the Fall of Saigon and end of the war, doesnt call the last run-in a “war”).

That fear is not a new feeling.

Author Ho Anh Thai, a former diplomat and author, wrote about the nostalgia for a more idealistic time in his 1991 novella Behind the Red Mist, via 17-year-old Tan, who is somehow transported back to the war years, meeting his then-young parents for the first time.

Tan, growing up in peacetime, feels strangely dislocated but finds a sense of purpose in Hanois early war years.

That nostalgia was resurgent three years later, during the lengthy mourning and funeral for General Vo Nguyen Giap, architect of the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, when young people raised on not much more than facts and figures about the war thronged the streets in quiet lines to pay their respects to a hero whose power within the Party waned decades before they were born.

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