In early 2020, Vietnam, as chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) for the year, found itself in an uncomfortable and challenging position—it had to either sound the alarm on an increasingly threatening public health emergency or wait and see if the situation would allow for the country's best-laid plans for its chairmanship to come to fruition. Significantly, this decision-making was set against the backdrop of consecutive border closures and self-protecting national measures across the region.

ASEAN is an association of ten member nations. Since its establishment in 1967, it has gone through much change and development, in tandem with the growing global importance of the region on the political and economic fronts. With a combined population of over 620 million, the ASEAN region boasts an economic market of about US$2.3 trillion. On the political-security front, the region is the ostensible epicentre of the contested Indo-Pacific region. In the recent context of rivalry between the United States and China, many, if not most, ASEAN member states maintain a neutral position and hence are able to straddle both sides of the divide, often benefitting economically from this neutral position. While each ASEAN member state maintains its own bilateral relations with key partners around the world, the region as a whole possesses its own strengths and selling points. Therefore, ASEAN maintains relatively strong diplomatic relations with numerous different countries and international organizations.

This chapter outlines the ASEAN experience in countering and dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. The regional response will be traced not only through the initiatives that ASEAN put in place in response to the pandemic but also through the collective sentiment that the ASEAN policies were espousing. The Covid-19 initiatives will be explored through case studies of two regional initiatives with a view to understanding the political, social and economic motivations behind the policies.