Checking body temprature at a Vietnamese hospital (Photo: VNA) Hanoi (VNA) – The UK’s Reuters news agency on April 30 run an articlepraising the Vietnamese government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Reuterswrote: It was late January, just after the Lunar New Year. Vietnam haddetected its first two cases of the new coronavirus days earlier, and thegovernment was contacting companies with experience of medical testing forurgent help.
Phan Quoc Viet,General Director of Viet A Corp, said: "The official said Vietnam needed to act quickly." The company later successfully produced the test kit LightPower iVA SARS-CoV-2 1st RT-rPCR which was recognized by the WorldHealth Organization (WHO).
As early as January 23,Vietnam suspended flights to and from the Chinese city of Wuhan, where theoutbreak started, immediately after discovering its first two cases. It actedeven though the WHO was at that point advising against travel restrictions. Aweek after that, Vietnam effectively closed its 1,400-km (870-mile) border withChina to all but essential trade.
By mid-March, Vietnam made the wearing of masks in public placesmandatory nationwide, well ahead of most other countries and not heeding theWHO's advice that only people with symptoms should wear them. Some of Vietnam'sgarment factories turned to making surgical and cloth masks to meet demand.
Vietnam, a country of 96 million people which shares a borderwith China, is signalling that it has succeeded where many wealthier and moredeveloped countries have not by containing the new coronavirus.
The government is officially reporting a relatively small 270cases and zero deaths. That puts the country on course to revive its economymuch sooner than most others, according to several public health expertsinterviewed by Reuters.
These public health experts say Vietnam was successful becauseit made early, decisive moves to restrict travel into the country, put tens ofthousands of people into quarantine and quickly scaled up the use of tests anda system to track down people who might have been exposed to the virus.
"The steps are easy to describe but difficult to implement,yet they've been very successful at implementing them over and overagain," said Matthew Moore, a Hanoi-based official from the US Centers forDisease Control and Prevention (CDC), who has been liaising with Vietnam'sgovernment on the outbreak since early January. He added that the CDC has"great confidence" in the Vietnamese government's response to thecrisis.
Vietnam increased the number of laboratories that can test forCOVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, from three at thebeginning of the outbreak in January, to 112 by April.
As of April29, 213,743 tests had been conducted in Vietnam, of which 270 werepositive, according to health ministry data.
"It is organised, it can make country-wide policy decisionsthat get enacted quickly and efficiently and without too muchcontroversy," said Guy Thwaites, director of the Oxford UniversityClinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City. Thwaites's laboratory has beenhelping to process tests.
Thwaites said the number of positive tests processed by hisorganisation's lab was in line with government data.
Todd Pollack, a Hanoi-based infectious diseases specialist atHarvard Medical School, said that less than 10 percent of the people who testedpositive for the virus in Vietnam were over 60 – the age group most likely todie from COVID-19. All patients, he added, were closely monitored in healthfacilities and given good medical care./.
VNA
