Vietnam relaxes COVID-19 restrictions as plateau of cases

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In comparison, its slightly more populated regional neighbor, the Philippines, has reported nearly 30 times as many cases and more than 500 deaths.

These public health experts say Vietnam was successful because it took early and decisive steps to restrict travel to the country, quarantined tens of thousands of people, and rapidly expanded the use of tests and a system to track people who may have been exposed. to the virus

“The steps are easy to describe but difficult to implement, yet they have been very successful in implementing them over and over again,” said Matthew Moore, an official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) based in Hanoi. who has been in contact with the Vietnam government about the outbreak since early January.

He added that the CDC has “great confidence” in the Vietnamese government’s response to the crisis.

Vietnam increased the number of laboratories that can test for COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, from three at the start of the outbreak in January to 112 in April.

As of Wednesday, 213,743 tests had been carried out in Vietnam, of which 270 were positive, according to data from the Ministry of Health.

That ratio of 791 tests for each confirmed case is by far the highest in the world, according to data from health ministries compiled by Reuters. The next highest, Taiwan, has performed 140 tests for each case.

Reuters was unable to independently verify the accuracy of the government’s test data. The Vietnamese government did not respond to questions about its data and the extent of its knowledge of virus-related cases. The two officials who led the country’s efforts against the virus were not available for interviews to answer questions about their work.

Kidong Park, the representative of the World Health Organization in Vietnam, also did not respond to requests for comment on the accuracy of the Vietnam data.

Vietnam has been helped, experts say, by the combination of its authoritarian leadership and open market economy, and a population with a memory of past epidemics ready to cooperate.

“He’s organized, he can make policy decisions across the country that are enacted quickly and efficiently and without too much controversy,” said Guy Thwaites, director of the Clinical Research Unit at the University of Oxford in Ho Chi Minh City. Thwaites’ lab has been helping to process the tests.

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Thwaites said the amount of positive tests processed by his organization’s laboratory was in line with government data. He said the hospital where he works in the wards, Ho Chi Minh City’s 550-bed Tropical Disease Hospital, which cares for a population of 45 million people in southern Vietnam, had not admitted any additional unreflected cases. in government numbers.

“If there were continuous, unreported or unappreciated community transmission, we would have seen patients in our hospital. We have not,” he said. Thwaites said that his organization’s lab increased the ability to do about 100 tests per day to about 1,000 per day.

Managers of 13 funeral homes in Hanoi contacted by Reuters said they had not seen an increase in deaths. One said that requests for funerals had decreased during the country’s closure, now lifted, due to the reduction in traffic accidents, one of the biggest killers in Vietnam.

Todd Pollack, an Hanoi-based infectious disease specialist at Harvard Medical School, said that less than 10 percent of people who tested positive for the virus in Vietnam were over the age of 60, the oldest age group probability of dying from COVID-19.

He added that all the patients were closely monitored in the health centers and received good medical attention. Pollack said a good comparison to Vietnam was South Korea, another country that managed to implement a large testing program and keep deaths relatively low.

“The case fatality rate in South Korea is around 2 percent, in part because tests are being done so widely,” Pollack said. “If we apply that rate to the number of confirmed cases in Vietnam, and consider these other factors, we can understand how deaths have been avoided so far.”

Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious disease physician and biosecurity fellow at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Safety, said: “There is no way to know for sure, but they have done a great job with their response, testing, isolation and forty people. “

PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP

In late February, when the President of the United States, Donald Trump, was still minimizing the dangers of the new coronavirus, Viet and his colleagues began to obtain crucial components necessary to mass produce COVID-19 test kits from the United States and Germany.

Researchers at the Vietnam State Military Medical University, in collaboration with Viet A Corp, had already designed a test kit, and the government issued a license to the private company to mass produce the kit. Viet said his company’s kits, which can perform multiple tests, had now provided 250,000 tests in Vietnam and exported 20,000-test-capable kits.

Already on January 23, Vietnam suspended flights to and from the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the outbreak began, immediately after discovering its first two cases. It acted despite the fact that, at the time, the WHO advised against travel restrictions. A week after that, Vietnam effectively closed its 1,400 km (870 mile) border with China to everything but essential trade.

In mid-March, Vietnam made wearing masks compulsory in public places across the country, well ahead of most other countries, and ignored WHO advice that only people with symptoms should wear them. Some of Vietnam’s garment factories turned to making surgical masks and cloth to meet demand.

The WHO did not respond to Reuters questions about Vietnam ignoring its advice.

MASSIVE QUARANTINE

The intensification of the Vietnam tests was carried out in conjunction with a comprehensive contact search program and the quarantine of tens of thousands of people, many of them Vietnamese abroad who returned home to escape the increasingly outbreaks. serious in Europe and the United States.

The evidence from Viet A Corp was first put into use on March 4, Viet told Reuters. In the six weeks prior to that, the country had gradually increased testing, but the number of people with the virus remained below 20. In the second week of March, that number more than doubled.

In early March, only a fraction of the tens of thousands of arrivals at military-run quarantine centers set up to house them were tested for the virus, according to data from the Ministry of Health. But in early April, the test numbers began to exceed the number of people in quarantine.

Medical officials tested and re-tested the suspected cases, and gradually released those who tested negative multiple times. Many tests were also conducted on groups of people who were not in quarantine and who may have been exposed to the virus.

The country’s swift response does not appear to have been hampered by the withdrawal of its health minister in November. Acting substitute Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam, a Communist Party official with no experience in public health, has become a hero on social media for his role at the forefront of Vietnam’s coronavirus workforce.

Neither Dam nor the Vice Minister of Health, Nguyen Thanh Long, was available for an interview.

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