INTRODUCTION

The Covid-19 pandemic, one of the most serious health crises in human history, spread rapidly across the globe since the end of 2019. As Covid-19 spread and the death toll mounted, governments faced the hard reality that saving lives entailed severely limiting or strictly monitoring social contact, with most opting to impose mobility restrictions and economic shutdowns that came at high economic cost. Strategies adopted by governments around the world did, however, range from no intervention at all to strict measures imposed on the population, such as lockdowns (Zibaseresht 2020).

One year into the pandemic, Vietnam emerged as one of the few countries that had largely succeeded in controlling the outbreak, while others, including more advanced and developed nations, witnessed an out-of-control spread of the virus, causing hundreds, even thousands, of deaths every day. However, the emergence of the Delta variant in 2021 put into question the entire system of rigorous contact tracing and other preventive mechanisms, which had until then enabled the country to perform well. In 2021, Vietnam hit its hardest days since the beginning of the pandemic, with the daily infection rate swelling to the thousands and the death toll rising. In end-August 2021, after several lockdowns and closures of most activities, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh announced that the country could not rely indefinitely on these measures and quarantines. Instead, it would switch to a strategy of living safely with the virus.

Vietnam's Covid-19 experience thus followed two distinct phases. For the first year and a half of the pandemic, the country adopted strict measures and a zero-Covid strategy. Thereafter, the government declared that people would have to learn how to live with the virus instead of avoiding it and incurring high economic costs. Vietnam's second phase was a move to a strategy of flexible adaptation in dealing with the pandemic. The country moved into this second phase later than some other countries, but it marked the end of an era of severe restrictions and a shift towards more flexible and adaptive measures that allowed daily life and business to return to normal. This chapter provides an account of Vietnam's Covid-19 coping strategy and its policy interventions and outcomes.