Vietnam’s Response to COVID-19: January 2020 to July 2022

A large number of governments, particularly those of the Western world, have been heavily criticized for untimely or ill-fitting containment policies addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, in the face of it all, Vietnam and other Asian countries appear to have had the firmest grasp on how to initially contain the twenty-first century’s worst public health disaster to date. Until the highly virulent Delta variant arrived in Vietnam in April 2021, Vietnam kept its cases and death rate exceedingly low since the start of the pandemic. Even in the midst of the virulent “fourth wave,” Vietnam reported a relatively low rate of 44.27 deaths per 100,000 people compared to the United States, which reported 308.76 deaths per 100,000. Strategies of pandemic containment in Vietnam changed dramatically over time, from a zero-new-case approach based on strict non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), i.e., lockdowns, tracing, and mass isolation, to immunization, employing vaccine diplomacy and public support. This chapter will cover Vietnam’s pandemic response strategies from January 2020 to July 2022, with a focus on the early containment strategies that were globally praised for effectiveness in the first and second waves of the pandemic and the country’s shift to an endemic vaccination in later stages of the pandemic.