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Vietnam lifts lockdown: How a country of 95m bordering China recorded zero coronavirus deaths
From the first-known international cases in January, Hanoi has taken no chances. And government hackers may even have helped early on
Vietnam has started to lift the strict movement and social distancing restrictions that still remain in many of its Southeast Asian nations, allowing daily life in major cities to slowly come back to normal.
No provinces in Vietnam are now seen as “highly prone” to the pandemic, Nguyen Xuan Phuc, the Prime Minister, announced on Wednesday, although some non-essential businesses will remain closed.
The Communist country of 95 million has been an under-reported success story of the pandemic, which has had just 268 coronavirus cases and no deaths.
It has managed to keep the virus under control despite being less wealthy than other strong Asian performers like South Korea and Taiwan, and its 870-mile porous border with China.
Like its Asian allies, Vietnam’s swift response was based on a robust pandemic response plan that was forged after recent deadly brushes with other high-risk infectious diseases, including SARS and H151.
The Vietnamese strategy focused on a combination of targeted, rigorous contact-tracing and testing to swiftly contain small clusters of Covid-19 before they spread further.
From the first-known international cases in January, Hanoi has taken no chances. In February, it quarantined more than 10,000 people in the Son Loi Commune in the northern province of Vinh Phuc after a smattering of infections.
It also decided early on to impose a 14-day quarantine on anyone arriving in Vietnam from a high-risk area. All schools and universities have also been closed since the beginning of February.
In March, when Vietnam’s 22-day disease-free run was broken by a cluster of imported cases linked to a flight from London, officials tracked down and isolated all passengers, and suspended visa-free entry for the UK and several European countries. It later sealed off its borders.
A massive public information campaign – including a song about hand-washing that went viral – has been made easier by state-controlled media.
Last week Dr John MacArthur, Thailand country director for the US Centres for Disease Control, praised Vietnam’s response and attributed it to “strong public health systems, the whole-of-government approach” and a huge team of “disease detectives” to carry out contact tracing.
Vietnam’s already formidable state security apparatus that relies on close public surveillance with the assistance of the military has also been a valuable tool in enforcing the fight against a pandemic, although it raises obvious civil liberty concerns that would be strongly resisted in democracies.
Finally, the country’s prowess on the internet may have also given it an early advantage.
FireEye, a US cybersecurity firm, revealed on Wednesday that state-backed hackers had attempted to break into organisations at the centre of Beijing’s efforts to combat the outbreak.
The hacking group known as APT32 , which cyber security groups believe operates on behalf of the Vietnamese government, had tried to compromise the personal and professional email accounts of staff at China’s Ministry of Emergency Management and the government of Wuhan, the virus epicentre.
“From at least January to April 2020, suspected Vietnamese actors APT32 carried out intrusion campaigns against Chinese targets that Mandiant Threat Intelligence believes was designed to collect intelligence on the Covid-19 crisis,” FireEye said in a statement.
It is not known what information, if anything, hackers were able to glean but it suggests that Vietnam was already aware of a serious emerging problem, and could have obtained valuable early data.
“These attacks speak to the virus being an intelligence priority - everyone is throwing everything they’ve got at it, and APT32 is what Vietnam has,” Ben Read, senior manager for analysis at FireEye’s Mandiant threat intelligence unit, told Reuters.
The Vietnamese government has so far not made any comment.