Bangladesh’s dhakatribune.com has published an article on Vietnam’s fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, saying the country could offer valuable lessons on how to curb the disease’s spread amid a poor healthcare system and low budget funds.

An American patient is discharged from hospital in Da Nang city on April 3.
(Photo: VNA)

Vietnam has reported only more than 250 COVID-19 cases and no fatalities. More than half of those infected have recovered.

During Tet - the lunar new year and the most important celebration in Vietnamese culture, held at the end of January this year - Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc attended a government meeting “declaring war” on the coronavirus, the article stated.

Rather than embarking on mass testing, Vietnam focused on quarantining infected people and tracking down those they had been in contact with.

Apart from this aggressive tracing, other measures adopted include compulsory quarantine and the conscription of medical students and retired doctors and nurses.

And from very early on, anyone arriving in Vietnam from a high-risk area was quarantined for 14 days. All schools and universities were closed at the beginning of February.

Vietnam’s success in containing COVID-19 depends in part on the mobilisation of medical and military personnel, and surveillance, according to the article.

Security officials can be found on every street, every neighborhood, and every village. The military is also deploying soldiers and material in the fight against the coronavirus, it said. About 800 people found sharing “fake news” on the virus have been fined.

The article also quoted Carl Thayer, a professor at the University of New South Wales Canberra, as saying that Vietnam is a mobilisation society and the Vietnamese Government is good at responding to natural disasters.