Bangladesh’s press praises Vietnam’s COVID-19 fight

Vietnam has reported only more than 250 COVID-19 cases and no fatalities. More than half of those infected have recovered.

According to the article, during Tet - the Lunar New Year Festival, which is the most important celebration in Vietnamese culture, held at the end of January this year - Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc attended a government meeting “declaring war” on the coronavirus.

Rather than embarking on mass testing, Vietnam focused on quarantining infected people and tracking down those they had been in contact with.

Apart from this aggressive tracing, other measures adopted include compulsory quarantine and the conscription of medical students and retired doctors and nurses.

The article said that anyone arriving in Vietnam from a high-risk area was quarantined for 14 days. All schools and universities were closed at the beginning of February.

Vietnam’s success in containing COVID-19 depends in part on the mobilisation of medical and military personnel, and surveillance.

Security officials can be found on every street, every neighborhood, and every village. The military is also deploying soldiers and material in the fight against the coronavirus, it said. About 800 people found sharing “fake news” on the virus have been fined.

In addition, the article also quoted Carl Thayer, a professor at the University of New South Wales Canberra, as saying that Vietnam is a mobilisation society and the Vietnamese Government is good at responding to natural disasters./.