Flights out of the north of Vietnam are cancelled
There has been a slight detection of new Covid cases in Vietnam recently, and when I say slight I mean that it is less than 100. These detections are all in the same part of the country and all of the locations are in and around Hanoi, which of course is a very densely populated city.
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This comes at the worst possible time because we are fast approaching TET, which is next week. During TET people tend to travel all over the place in order to visit family as it is considered to be the most important holiday of the year. I recently discovered from a friend who was meant to be traveling down south to both here in Da Nang and then later to an island that is sought of Saigon has been told that she is not allowed to travel. I am not certain if this applies to everyone and there has been some speculation that it is being applied only to foreigners and not to Vietnamese people.
Of course the last part of what I just said could just be bullcrap as the expat community tends to complain that xenophobia is the case anytime there is a situations that they do not understand. So I don't know if this is the case for everyone or if it is just for foreigners.
It wouldn't make much sense to apply it to only foreigners seeing as how nearly every foreigner that is currently in Vietnam has been here since before Covid was a thing seeing as how the only people who have been let in since then were under very specific situations / professions and then they had to undergo multiple rounds of testing as well as 14 days of quarantine.
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Notice anything wrong with this picture?
I certainly hope that this is just an overreaction on the part of my foreign friend who lives and works in Hanoi because if it is true it is both terrible and doesn't make any sort of sense from a disease prevention point of view.
I think it would be relatively difficult for the government to truly enforce a "no travel during TET" directive if they were to attempt to make that sort of thing happen, but what do I know? I'm just a stupid foreigner. I hadn't planned on going anywhere during TET anyway.
Also, all of the schools were closed in Hanoi as of part of the response to this new detection of the virus and one factory in the province of Hai Duong as well as locking down multiple neighborhoods where no one is allowed in or out until the virus, i dunno, fizzles out.
So from an outsider's point of view it probably looks like Vietnam has done a great job preventing the spread of Covid seeing as how they have had only 35 deaths and less than 2000 overall cases. The thing that concerns me about these numbers is because based on what little I know about the government here, they aren't exactly "transparent" about whatever it is that they happen to be doing on just about anything.
The number of deaths could actually be considerably higher than that because in a country of 90 million people, there are people dying every day from all manner of things. It could be a situation where unlike in the west where anyone dying with Covid ends up being marked down as dying from Covid... which is a topic of great debate on the internet that I don't care to get into, honestly.
However, when a Covid death was reported here the official cause of death was actually released to the public and it was clear to see that those 35 cases of people who did die, had a LOT of other problems as well and I suspect this is the case with likely every death from Covid around the world.