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Foreign presses praise VN’s success against COVID-19 pandemic

VGP – Viet Nam has gone more than two weeks without a single case of coronavirus community transmission, effectively beating the virus for a second time, according to ABC News.

September 24, 2020 1:15 PM GMT+7

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The Sydney-based news outlet on September 22 published an article named “How did Viet Nam bring the spread of coronavirus to a halt — again?”

ABC News attributed the success to Vietnamese Government’s fast and hard action against the virus.

The Government used a range of creative means to communicate messaging about symptoms, prevention and testing sites, including via state media outlets, social media, text messages, and famously — a viral song about the importance of hand-washing.

In the second wave, "[Authorities did] all of the simple stuff they did last time, but they did it at scale and they did it rapidly," according to Professor Thwaites.

He added that "In that way they were able to test the equivalent of around 100,000 people through around 20,000 tests. This allowed them to save a lot of time and money."

The PM announced last week that flights between Viet Nam and Seoul, Guangzhou, Chinese Taipei and Tokyo would resume. Tourists cannot enter yet, with repatriating Vietnamese and foreigners who are highly-skilled workers or investors given early priority.

"Viet Nam is still being expected to be one of the few countries that will continue to grow in 2020, while the rest of the world is being projected to enter into recession," according to international consultancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The Asian Development Bank projects Viet Nam's economy will grow by 1.8% this year, making it one of the only South-East Asian economies not to contract. 

In addition, Counter Punch, a US magazine, has recently run an article highlighting the strength of social solidarity in the fight against COVID-19 in Viet Nam.

According to the article, Viet Nam acted quickly and decisively to contain the COVID-19 pandemic by closing its borders, suspending flights from other countries, not issuing visas to foreign nationals, contact tracing, quarantine, and a short-lived nationwide shutdown, the article said.

Viet Nam is well-positioned with a younger generation that is more individualistic than that of its parents because of their country’s integration into the global community, the Internet, and the fact that they are growing up in a time of peace, yet still possesses a strong sense of solidarity (“mutual support within a group”) and identification with the collective, which is heightened in times of crisis.

The article cited a British Council New Generation Viet Nam survey as saying that 72% of respondents believe their country will be better off in 15 years than it was before 2019, which reflects the well-documented optimism of the Vietnamese people.

Viet Nam has confirmed 1,069 SARS-CoV-2 infections so far. Of the total, 691 were locally-transmitted cases. As many as 991 patients have recovered while 35 died from complications related to the disease. Most of the fatalities were the elderly with serious underlying health conditions./. 

By Kim Loan