Beaches are open, but no swimming!

I often wonder what exactly is going through the heads of the people that make the rules here in Da Nang that are meant to protect us from certain death should we catch Covid. It's my understanding that it is a chance of one in 10,000,000 or something so better extremely safe than sorry suppose.

Recently, due to damn near civil unrest and a deteriorating economy in a population that was already poor to begin with, the government started easing some of the restrictions to allow the public a little bit of freedom to do stuff.

One of the first things they did was to re-open restaurants for take-away and also open up some public spaces so that people can get outside and I dunno, live a little.

So we are allowed on the beaches in an unlimited quantity of people (there are a million people living here) and we are allowed to walk to and fro to our heart's content but there is one thing we definitely can not do: You can't go for a swim.

That image isn't the best so let me break it down for you: You have to wear masks, you have to stay away form other people and you have to "stopping all swimming-related activities."

So today I went down to the beach and there were hundreds of people on the sand in the shade. Most were not wearing masks. There were lifeguards there but only for the purpose of going mental on the whistles if anyone got more than say knee deep in the water. They didn't seem to be terribly concerned about the lack of masks either.

So if the point of not allowing swimming is to make sure that people wear masks, then why not get on people's cases for not wearing masks? I'm not saying I would approve of that but at least it would make sense.

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I'm not saying the above picture, which was taken months ago would be a good idea either. It's quite nightmarish to be honest with you and I avoid the beach at all costs on weekends because of this, but to not allow people into the water at all seems so crazy to me.

I noticed a few people on surfboards that simply ignore the whistles and got in anyway and there doesn't seem to be any repercussion for those folks. Hopefully notions like this will spread and the people will just ignore the commands of the people who don't really have any power anyway.

Da Nang and the rest of Vietnam need to play their hand very carefully in the coming weeks because after 6 weeks of basically not being allowed to do anything including work, the population is quickly tiring of being told what to do and if the officials continue to try to do so, we could see an uprising on our hands and I've been told this is frowned upon in communist countries.