Viet Nam's response to COVID
From: Vsg <vsg-bounces@mailman11.u.washington.edu> On Behalf Of Raymond Mallon
Sent: Thursday, January 28, 2021 5:29 AM
To: Nicolas Lainez <niklainez@gmail.com>
Cc: vsg@u.washington.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Vietnam's pandemic
As one of my daughters goes into home quarantine tonight as an F4, I was reminded of these thoughtful observations may be of interest to those who like to think seriously about why Việt Nam achieved what it has.
Please note these reflections were from September 2020.
Earning the Vietnamese Public’s Trust
https://medium.com/@hondumuc/earning-the-vietnamese-publics-trust-58e0d31dfc3
“ In all the talk about Vietnam's pandemic response, whether praised or critiqued, there has been one consistent element of the characterization that has never sat well with me. The Vietnamese public has been neither passively trusting nor fearful:”
Some of the feedback on the observations in Twitter are also interesting https://twitter.com/hondumuc/status/1310503720841482240?s=21
Raymond Mallon
Economist, Hà Nội
Sent from a phone
On 28 Jan 2021, at 16:18, Nicolas Lainez <niklainez@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear colleagues,
There is a covid outbreak in Hai Duong and Quang Ninh near Hanoi. One locally transmitted case is the highly contagious UK variant.
Best wishes,
Nicolas Lainez, PhD
ISEAS/NUS
Singapore
Le 28 janv. 2021 à 12:32, Greg Nagle <gnagle2000@gmail.com> a écrit :
I would be interested to see public service efforts from other countries in Asia about the pandemic.
Is there any other place in the world that had things quite like this?
The video below is propaganda but moving. It says to behave well since your children are watching how you act,
"During the pandemic, there will be loss and sacrifice. However, we cannot afford to forfeit the compassion for your own fellow countrymen and women.
The everlasting power of Vietnam is our unity and solidarity.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=216996056309618
If you cannot open that facebook link, try this.
Greg Nagle
PhD Forest and watershed science
Cornell University
Hanoi, Vietnam
On Thu, Jan 28, 2021 at 4:22 AM billhayton <bill@billhayton.com> wrote:
I’m not so sure about this. My recollection is that the Vietnam flight ban was never lifted (I could be wrong).
This...
https://www.vietnam-briefing.com/news/covid-19-vietnam-travel-updates-restrictions.html/
suggests the ban on all foreign arrivals (with some exceptions) was formally imposed on 22 March 2020. There had been a ban on Wuhan and then Chinese arrivals from before this date.
Cheers
Bill Hayton
On 27 Jan 2021, at 18:26, Markus Taussig <mtaussig@business.rutgers.edu> wrote:
This is great stuff, Balazs! The point of fluctuating openness vis-a-wis China, in particular, seems to me to reflect both: a) Vietnam’s fluctuating confidence about its own domestic realities (e.g. degree to which health system was in danger of being overloaded) and b) China’s evolution from original source of the virus to relative leader in public policy control over the pandemic.
On Jan 27, 2021, at 12:31 PM, Balazs Szalontai <aoverl@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Dear All:
Concerning the impact Vietnam's early ban on travel from China, let me ask what you think about the following chronology of events (see the attached file, as I didn't want to overload the discussion with a long list of events, let alone with dozens of source links). To my admittedly untrained eyes, it appears that Vietnam did impose a strict ban on travel from China in January-February, but as soon as mid-February, there was increasing pressure both from China and from various Vietnamese economic groups for the lifting of the ban as soon as possible. By late February and March, the Vietnamese authorities seem to have concluded that they had brought COVID-19 under control, and gradually lifted the travel ban to/from China. Soon after, by early April, the situation became so serious that the government declared COVID-19 a nationwide epidemic. I have no idea if there was any causal connection between the lifted ban and the subsequent virus upsurge (possibly there was not, since by then COVID-19 had spread to so many countries in Europe that a travel ban confined to China couldn't have been sufficient), but I still feel that the authorities were duly vigilant first, but became a bit complacent later, and they stepped up their measures only after the shock of the March 2020 upsurge. But of course I may be wrong.
All the best,
Balazs Szalontai
On Thursday, 28 January 2021, 02:05:55 GMT+9, Jason Morgan <jmorgan288@gmail.com> wrote:
I think one of the most fatal mistakes in the United States and Europe was the failure to impose the total travel ban early, unlike what Vietnam did.
It seems many people who praise Vietnam, interestingly, are unhappy if the West had imposed that travel ban.
Below is a report by the New York Times in April 2020. In hindsight, it indicated too many possibly infected people entered the United States.
"Since Chinese officials disclosed the outbreak of a mysterious pneumonia like illness to international health officials on New Year’s Eve, at least 430,000 people have arrived in the United States on direct flights from China, including nearly 40,000 in the two months after President Trump imposed restrictions on such travel, according to an analysis of data collected in both countries.
The bulk of the passengers, who were of multiple nationalities, arrived in January, at airports in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Newark and Detroit. Thousands of them flew directly from Wuhan, the center of the coronavirus outbreak, as American public health officials were only beginning to assess the risks to the United States.
Flights continued this past week, the data show, with passengers traveling from Beijing to Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, under rules that exempt Americans and some others from the clampdown that took effect on Feb. 2. In all, 279 flights from China have arrived in the United States since then, and screening procedures have been uneven, interviews show.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly suggested that his travel measures impeded the virus’s spread in the United States. “I do think we were very early, but I also think that we were very smart, because we stopped China,” he said at a briefing on Tuesday, adding, “That was probably the biggest decision we made so far.” Last month, he said, “We’re the ones that kept China out of here.”
But the analysis of the flight and other data by The New York Times shows the travel measures, however effective, may have come too late to have “kept China out,” particularly in light of recent statements from health officials that as many as 25 percent of people infected with the virus may never show symptoms. Many infectious-disease experts suspect that the virus had been spreading undetected for weeks after the first American case was confirmed, in Washington State, on Jan. 20, and that it had continued to be introduced. In fact, no one knows when the virus first arrived in the United States."
Jason Morgan,
Singapore
On Wed, Jan 27, 2021 at 4:44 PM g-i -a-o <vtq.giao@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Colleagues,
On surveillance I would say that it's not just the neighborhood wardens -- Vietnam has a thick surveillance network comprised of people from many sectors, e.g. village health collaborators, village population collaborators. The country has about 8500 communes, each with an average of 10 villages, so that's 85000 people from any single sector. Village health collaborators typically report to their respective Commune Health Centers the last week of every month, whether there's a pandemic or not, about what's going on in their neighborhoods.
A common combination I saw during the COVID19 outbreak in Da Nang was that people would work in teams of 3: A village head (that is, "neighborhood warden", or "tổ trưởng" in urban areas, "trưởng thôn" in the rural North, and "trưởng ấp" in the rural South), a village health collaborator, and a commune police officer would together visit households with people returning from Da Nang to enforce movement restrictions.
All the best,
Giao
Vu Thi Quynh Giao
Nam Dinh, Vietnam
On Wed, Jan 27, 2021 at 11:20 PM billhayton <bill@billhayton.com> wrote:
Perhaps also worth remembering that Vietnam banned travel from China early on - something that contributed mightily to its success in controlling the virus. However, this was strongly opposed in the United States by people that considered themselves critics of the Trump administration eg...
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/04/coronavirus-quaratine-travel-110750
"The Trump administration’s quarantine and travel ban in response to the Wuhan coronavirus could undercut international efforts to fight the outbreak by antagonizing Chinese leaders, as well as stigmatizing people of Asian descent, according to a growing chorus of public health experts and lawmakers.”
If you want to control the virus, you have to stop people hosting the virus coming into contact with fresh hosts...
Bill
On 27 Jan 2021, at 15:49, David Biggs <biggsbiggs@gmail.com> wrote:
Likewise enjoying this conversation, especially for the in-depth, comparative analysis story (VN vs US approach) that has yet to be written. What mostly characterizes the American response (and I gather the German response) is a decentralization of federal policies, funds and implementation to states. In Vietnam, the response seems more driven by national organizations with very little openings for provincial governments to interpret or improvise on instructions. A cousin of mine is a National Guard doctor in the deep red state of Kentucky who, last March, canceled a long-planned family vacation to Vietnam. When I asked him if his National Guard medical unit would be deployed to triage covid patients to field hospitals, my Trump-loving cousin quickly replied that this would never happen in Kentucky, because "unlike California, it's not a Socialist state." (That old line!)
Now we have over 425,000 people dead in the US, my cousin's rural hospital is full of covid patients taking up all of its ICUs, and county and state health systems are crashing their anemic, web-based scheduling systems just trying to schedule vaccines to elderly people who don't know or can't access websites.
I'd love to read a comparative study that pushes past old tropes and labels and really compares public health responses to Covid--policies, economics, media, implementation--in Vietnam, US and other states. Any favorite reads?
David Biggs
UC Riverside
On Wed, Jan 27, 2021 at 6:33 AM Markus Taussig <mtaussig@business.rutgers.edu> wrote:
Dear all,
I’m enjoying the discussion on this topic of extreme relevance to all of us.
My take is that surely there is indeed some role for the state here — as shown on the opposite end of the spectrum by the results of the US and other countries far less organized and far less competent government responses. However, my reading of literature about both this pandemic and the previous one a hundred years before, is that the most important interventions have been those relating to very simple, commonsense behaviors, e.g. wearing masks, washing hands. From my perspective, these behaviors are far more likely to be shaped by more general public-interest-orientation. Words like “collectivist” can perhaps be used, but I don’t find them super useful, as they often sound to me — at least when they come from the mouths of fellow Caucasian Americans — like they’re attributing exotic, mystical characteristics to fellow human beings. My perspective is that Vietnamese have instead responded well to consistent, science-based, public-interest-oriented messaging from the government (and that even us messy Americans could’ve responded better had we been presented with a similar policy response).
Vietnamese people did not at all exhibit such collectivism for the first decade or so of the government trying to regulate the wearing of motorcycle helmets, for example. Instead, with motorcycle helmets, it seems to me, the key in that case was a combination of some state enforcement capacity (consistent with Bill’s point of emphasis) and the state cleaning up some of the contradictions and unfairnesses in the state’s own regulatory actions. I personally see the latter as having been much more i important in inducing Vietnamese citizens to appreciate and buy into the legitimate public interest goals of the government. In particular, there was widespread understanding in the early years that the government was profiting from helmet sales, as the domestic production was only state-owned and (I think this part is true, but haven’t done the research) imported helmets faced significant tariffs (aimed at protecting the state-owned producers). Furthermore, the bad reputation of the traffic police hurt the effort. My understanding is that the success of the eventual success of the helmet campaign, which seemed like an impossible miracle to many of us at the time, involved liberalizing regulation of helmet production, which allowed for not only lower prices but also higher quality and private sector marketing, and a (at least temporary) improvement in the behavior of the traffic police (more law-based). Earlier efforts also involved a reasonable enforcement effort, but it just wasn’t seen as legitimately about public interest and so the police were overwhelmed by the citizenry’s non-compliance.
I think the motorcycle helmet case is far from an isolated one in Vietnam, in terms of examples of Vietnamese people — like people everywhere — not acting in the public interest. In the case of Covid, however, I think the Vietnamese government has earned widespread compliance through an impressive public policy effort.
Markus
On Jan 26, 2021, at 5:27 PM, billhayton <bill@billhayton.com> wrote:
Dear all,
I think it’s possible to overthink this. The Vietnamese authorities stopped the spread of the virus because they had effective local surveillance and the capacity and the will to stop people moving around. It wasn’t even the 'secret police’, it was the neighbourhood wardens and everyone that they report to. The government closed the borders (no mean feat) and publicly identified people who had been infected and announced all the dodgy bars that they had visited. They did a very effective job.
The tik-tok videos were fun but it was surveillance and movement controls that did the work.
Best wishes
Bill
On 26 Jan 2021, at 19:52, Anthony Morreale <amorreale22@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello all,
I hope to clarify this thread and add my 2c.
In Joe Buckley’s original essay shared to the listserv, he laid out a few mechanisms by which the covid response had been successfully executed, including strict quarantine measures, a successful communication strategy, and unwavering border closures. If my interpretation is accurate (and please correct me if it isn’t) he also emphasized that these strategies were successfully executed in spite of a downward trend in state capacity, and that pace Bill Hayton’s much earlier analysis, the repressive apparatus was not the primary means by which it was accomplished. Joe also adds that cash transfers did contribute to the success, and that the mass organizations played an important role in mediating the population's access to state aid, but hints that they weren’t sizable enough to be an obvious explanation on their own.
It seems to me that one could take issue either with his unwillingness to sufficiently emphasize a particular set of causes, or one could object to particular factors being included in the list. However, I’m hoping that the contributions framing the response in terms of personal incentives (Professor Asselin’s open question about the costs associated with treatment), and the contributions associated with “collectivism” and the old canard about a “tradition of resistance to foreign invasion”, can be modulated somehow to bring them to a similar level of abstraction, so that they may be productively contrasted to Joe’s original contribution.
On the one hand, I share Hoang Vu’s suspicions, and would even put it more starkly: is it even valid to say that Vietnam has been any more subject to "foreign invasion” than other countries both in the region and around the world? A dozen “invasions" in two thousand years hardly stands out as many, and in any event there has been at least as much "civil war” as foreign invasion. This all of course assumes that it makes any theoretical sense to see the current nation state of Vietnam as the repository of all memories of all the events that took place in the region over the last millennia, indeed I think most historians would agree that these “memories" of resistance to foreign invasion etc are of quite recent vintage, and are not transmitted through the social structure and folklore, but were invented by scholars, statesmen and propagandists as a legitimizing strategy. While this doesn't make them unimportant, it puts them firmly in the realm of national myths and not in the realm of a structuring principal of social relations.
A similar case can be made for the old canard about the "traditional village" collectivism. Not only does the state cover a multi ethnic territory with historically quite different rural social structures, but even among the “Vietnamese” there have always been large quasi urban agglomerations, coastal sea plying communities, itinerant wanderers, mass migrations, and very pronounced regional variations in the village system. The comparative dimension also fails again, is there any evidence that Vietnamese “traditional villages” were unique in whatever measure of solidarity compared to the countries with a terrible covid response?
On the other hand, Linh & Tam’s article only contains a brief-- and in my opinion superficial and perfunctory-- nod to “collectivism” and “individualism”. The majority of the article, and indeed its most valuable contribution, is its more detailed analysis of the repressive surveillance measures on the one hand, and the unification of state messaging and censorship capacities on the other. Indeed I think it would be a mistake to engage with this article primarily in terms of the dismissed appeals to whiggish history with which we are all very familiar, and which perform little conceptual work in the thrust of the article. If we focus too much on these ‘collectivism’ and ’tradition’ aspects, I fear we will be engaging in a sort of elite institutional gatekeeping.
While I disagree with Merle Ratner’s summation of “Vietnamese collectivism” on similar grounds, I think he provides a different way forward by institutionally locating this “collectivism” (whatever its origin or nature) in the mass organizations and, thereby, the particularities of the way Vietnamese political and civil society are sutured together. This can be contrasted to Professor Asselin’s contribution, which instead focuses on the role of individual incentive and sanction; and Bill Hayton’s much earlier contribution, which focuses on the secret police. This appears to me to be the crux of the debate, placed on a similar level of abstraction.
To this list I would emphasize an element which I think hasn’t been sufficiently emphasized in Joe’s original article (which, to be fair to Joe, isn’t exactly an explanation for Vietnam's success as much as it is a review of the last year). This element is the roles of early border closures and “communication”. So, to partially build on Linh & Tam’s insights, I think the capacity for these repressive measures reveal something important about the Vietnamese state. The border closures have been severe and have greatly damaged the bottom line of powerful economic interests within the country. Likewise the “communication” has gone beyond fun music videos about hand washing and has extended to a willingness to publish comparatively detailed information about the comings and goings of individual cases, even when those cases were quite powerful people. There are no HIPPA obstacles. I venture these two elements because I think they give us information about the “relative autonomy” of the Vietnamese state, or at least the relative dominance of particular economic and political network groupings within it. This may also reflect the relative underdevelopment of business lobbies. I think we can hypothesize (albeit in a very rudimentary way) that, whatever are the primary social bases which stitch together the Vietnamese state, the party has built a sufficiently diversified political bloc so as to effectively ignore the lobbying power of particular sectors. I don’t think that the effect of the importance of the mass organizations can be ignored, but I think they need to somehow be integrated into a broader schematic of the relations between political and civil society that takes elite lobbying groups into account. Emphasizing these elements together, I believe, could allow us to more precisely contrast Vietnam with the failures of Euro-American responses, which have been ravaged by extraordinary campaigns of popular demobilization on the one hand, and extraordinary aggrandizement of the power of business lobbies on the other.
Best,
Anthony Morreale,
PhD Candidate,
UC Berkeley
History
On Jan 26, 2021, at 3:38 AM, Merle Ratner <merle_ratner@hotmail.com> wrote:
Dear All,
Vietnam's collectivism comes both from historic village relations, opposition to foreign invasion and the ethics of socialism as summarized by Ho Chi Minh.
The "grassroots management system" is both bottom up and top down: I have traveled to more than 35 provinces with the Vietnam Women's Union and the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange/dioxin, to both cities and communes and found, while uneven, a high level of activity of local (both paid and unpaid) grass roots organizers.
The Women's Union, for example, beyond the Union membership meetings has a large variety of clubs engaged in everything from promoting public health campaigns, to helping trafficked women, to organizing women workers in factories, to cultural activities, to microcredit and cooperatives to rights of the girl child, women's leadership promotion, etc. etc. With initiative from the grass roots, the Women's Union has pioneered cutting edge new programs like clubs for domestic workers, men's groups to combat the culture of domestic violence and more.
This range of activities would not be possible without the agency, determination and energy of volunteer organizers, the best of whom often end up in local leadership of the Women's Union. So when a crisis like COVID comes, the local organizers know the circumstances of each family, what help they need and can do health checks with them and encourage collective health measures through community agreement.
Merle Ratner
CUNY Graduate Student
From: Vsg <vsg-bounces@mailman11.u.washington.edu> on behalf of Hoang Vu <hmv23@cornell.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2021 6:06 AM
To: billhayton <bill@billhayton.com>
Cc: VSG <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Vietnam's pandemic
Dear group,
The paragraph Bill highlighted also jumped at me. Aside from the essentialist and outdated account of Vietnamese history, I wonder why other countries with similar narratives of battling foreign invaders and natural disasters never developed the necessary "collectivist spirit" to contain Covid. I'm thinking of Egypt (162k cases, 9k deaths), Philippines (515k cases, 10k deaths), and Poland (1.48m cases, 35k deaths).
Hoang
On Tue, Jan 26, 2021 at 5:44 PM billhayton <bill@billhayton.com> wrote:
Dear Tam,
Thanks for this. I wonder how many non-specialist readers will capture the meaning of "grassroots management system” in Vietnam. This is, ultimately, the heart of Vietnam’s success - and yet the least-discussed.
I was struck by your account of Vietnamese society "The collectivism of traditional Vietnamese society originated from the country’s needs to consolidate its communities to fight against foreign aggression and to fight with nature (the reign of water treatment) (Nguyen 2012), and then was further strengthened throughout the history of the nation by the Confucian ideology”
Discuss…
Best wishes
Bill
On 26 Jan 2021, at 02:06, Hồ Thành Tâm <hothanhtam.ktol@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear colleagues,
We wrote an article explaining how Vietnam successfully coped with the first wave of COVID-19. Please check it out:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14649373.2020.1831811.
Best regards,
Tam
On Mon, Jan 25, 2021 at 23:12 Greg Nagle <gnagle2000@gmail.com> wrote:
Quite possible although the targeted mass testing seemed likely to pick up most of those infections. They were quite aggressive about those testing efforts which seemed well executed, I hope,,
I would feel better if they were able to do testing of sewage which can pick up hidden infections in communities but most Viets are on septic systems, even in Hanoi
Other sources from europe have indicated that 72% of infected people do not pass it on to anyone else with 10% accounting for 60% of transmissions.
These numbers are open to dispute of course.
But I do think there are and were unreported cases in Vietnam, if only because so many cases are asymptomatic. And those asymptomatic cases seem to be the most disturbing thing about this pandemic,
We still do not know the source of the recent Danang outbreak which made it into 3 hospitals, and who knows how long it was present.
Greg
Greg Nagle
PhD Forest and watershed science
Cornell University
Hanoi, Vietnam
On Mon, Jan 25, 2021 at 10:54 PM Pierre Asselin <passelin@sdsu.edu> wrote:
Colleagues:
A Vietnamese friend suggested the Vietnamese have done well with COVID in part because they understand they will have to pay the customary hefty amount to attending physicians to receive good treatment if they are hospitalized. For the same reason, the same friend indicated, some in poorer/rural areas don't report their symptoms to avoid hospitalization. The idea had not occurred to me but makes a lot of sense given Vietnam's own "inner workings." Any thoughts?
Pierre
Pierre Asselin
Professor of History - Dwight E. Stanford Chair in US Foreign Relations
San Diego State University
History Department
Latest book: https://www.amazon.com/Vietnams-American-War-Cambridge-Relations/dp/1107510503
On Sun, Jan 24, 2021 at 6:52 PM Greg Nagle <gnagle2000@gmail.com> wrote:
And this just came out too on the topic.
Greg Nagle
PhD Forest and watershed science
Cornell University
Hanoi, Vietnam
On Mon, Jan 25, 2021 at 3:34 AM Joe Buckley <joejbbuckley@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all,
I wrote about the political economy of COVID-19 in Vietnam for the New Left Review's Sidecar blog -https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/vietnams-pandemic
Best,
Joe Buckley
Independent