Why Vietnam Has No Coronavirus Deaths – and Lessons for Brazil

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Over five months after the first publicly reported cases in Vietnam of the novel coronavirus pandemic in China, a neighbour of the Asian country where the coronavirus began to spread, there are still no deaths from the disease. This is Vietnam, a country of just over 95 million people.

Vietnam borders China on its northern territory of just over 1,200 kilometers, and has an extensive relationship with other countries in Asia. As a result, when the pandemic first started to spread in China, the Vietnamese government projected that the country could see thousands of deaths.

But thanks to measures adopted in the fight against Covid-19, it now records only 369 cases, a little over 20 of them active, that is, with people still carrying the disease. The country can go for days without a new case being reported.

Vietnam started to take measures against the virus in January. On January 10th, even before the first coronavirus case was recorded in the country, passengers from Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus in China, began to be monitored.

The first case came on January 23rd, of a man who had come from Wuhan to visit his son in Vietnam. The two were promptly hospitalized. On February 1st, Vietnam was one of the first countries to ban flights from China and close the border with its northern neighbor.

The country’s small scale will undoubtedly have helped contain the virus, but countries with similar populations in the region have not achieved the same results, such as Thailand (3,202 cases and 69 million inhabitants), South Korea (13,338 cases and 52 million inhabitants) and Japan (21,026 cases and 126 million inhabitants).

The two countries closest to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, also recorded no deaths, partly due to measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in Vietnam itself.

In Brazil, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro together have fewer inhabitants than Vietnam, around 50 million, but together they account for over 370,000 cases of coronavirus. With 1.7 million cases, Brazil has a total of 8,355 cases per million inhabitants, a rate that in Vietnam is less than 0.0004.

The measures in Vietnam

Since the start of the pandemic, the government has ordered all its over 90 million inhabitants to wear masks, months before the order came from the World Health Organization (W.H.O.). Even suspected cases were promptly isolated.

The more than 5,000 Chinese workers who returned to Vietnam after the Chinese New Year were forced to quarantine, which experts say is likely to have prevented a further spread of the disease at the time.

The W.H.O. congratulated Vietnam on its response to the coronavirus and said the government’s actions were “crucial to contain the crisis early on”.

In February, the country’s Ministry of Health even went viral on social media by releasing a dance tune, along with an animated YouTube video, to raise awareness on the virus. The video had over 14 million views.

One of the most notable cases in the country’s fight to maintain its zero-death record is the 42-year-old Scottish pilot Stephen Cameron, who spent more than two months in the ICU before being discharged in early July.

Cameron was one of the most critical coronavirus patients in Vietnam. He became a matter of national pride: hundreds of Vietnamese even volunteered to donate a lung to the pilot amid the respiratory complications of the coronavirus, and the country spent over US$200,000 on his treatment.

History of other epidemics

Part of Vietnam’s concern with the coronavirus comes from its history with SARS, another epidemic that took over Southeast Asia in 2003, and H1N1 (the so-called bird flu) in 2009. At the time, Vietnam was one of the most affected countries, but it acquired knowledge on how to tackle the spread of highly contagious diseases.

Vietnam’s economy, as in the rest of the world, was largely impacted by the coronavirus. The International Monetary Fund projects GDP growth of 2.7 percent this year, a figure that, while positive, will be the lowest growth since the 1980s. The country has been growing at around seven percent since 2015, driven by the economic boom throughout the rest of Asia and China.