Vietnam determined to save British pilot, avoid its first COVID-19 death

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-vietnam-pilot/vietnam-determined-to-save-british-pilot-avoid-its-first-covid-19-death-idUSKBN22Q0V3

May 14, 2020 / 2:15 AM
Vietnam determined to save British pilot, avoid its first COVID-19 death
James Pearson

HANOI (Reuters) - Vietnam has mounted an all-out effort to save the life of its most critically ill coronavirus patient, a British pilot who works for Vietnam Airlines, the national carrier.

Through aggressive testing and a mass, centralised quarantine programme, the Southeast Asian country has kept its tally of coronavirus cases to just 288 and has reported no deaths.

Little expense has been spared to try save the life of the 43-year-old man, identified only as “Patient 91”, who caught the coronavirus at a bar in the southern business hub of Ho Chi Minh City in mid-March, state media reported.

More than 4,000 people connected to the cluster were tested, with 18 of them found to be infected with the coronavirus.

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https://thediplomat.com/2020/05/behind-vietnams-covid-19-response-deep-distrust-of-china/

Behind Vietnam’s COVID-19 Response, Deep Distrust of China
Despite public health cooperation, analysts say the Vietnamese Communist Party has little trust in the word of its Chinese counterparts.
By Bac Pham and Bennett Murray
May 14, 2020

On February 1, Vietnam made what, at the time, was a drastic decision. All flights from China, Hong Kong, and Macau were ordered cancelled over concerns about what would later be named COVID-19. Three days before, the decision had been made to cease issuing tourist visas for the same three passports. Coming just one day after the Trump administration announced tightening restrictions on travel from China, Vietnam was among the first to halt flights entirely — to China’s chagrin. It began shutting its 1,300-kilometer border with its largest trading partner the same day.

Although its case numbers were still only in the single digits, Vietnam did not stop there. Schools were set to reopen on February 3 after the week-long Lunar New Year holiday – the first new school week since the virus was first detected in Vietnam on January 23. But classes nationwide were scrapped, despite only eight diagnosed cases at the time in a country of 95 million. Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc called the fight against COVID-19 the “Spring General Offensive of 2020,” a reference to the name of North Vietnam’s final push against Saigon in 1975 at the end of the Vietnam War.

By the middle of April, community spread had apparently stopped. As of May 14, Vietnam has notched 29 consecutive days without a locally transmitted case. The country has reported a total of 288 cases of COVID-19, with no deaths.

While Vietnam’s success has been attributed to a multitude of factors – prompt action, bitter lessons learned from SARS, and a recent history of mass mobilization – those who are well acquainted with the Vietnamese Communist Party point to a ruling political organization that intimately understands, and deeply mistrusts, its brethren to the north.