People wait in line for Covid-19 testing in Hanoi, Vietnam. Photo / AP
People wait in line for Covid-19 testing in Hanoi, Vietnam. Photo / AP
Vietnam – until recently, a rare coronavirus success story – is in the middle of a fresh outbreak that has scientists "stumped", the BBC reports.
After 99 straight days of no local transmission, cases have suddenly surged in the south east Asian nation – a worrying sign for any countryor state that thinks it has the virus under control.
And that includes New Zealand, which yesterday marked its own 99-day run without community transmission.
Remarkably, up until a week ago, Vietnam had yet to record a single death from coronavirus. One week on, the death toll stands at 10.
The country was one of the first in the world to lock down and had reaped the benefit of that strategy. That was even more remarkable because it shares a border with China where Covid-19 was first recorded last year.
But a spike in cases in the central Vietnamese city of Da Nang caught everyone by surprise.
No-one knows how the first case in Da Nang – a 57-year-old man – came into contact with the virus.
There are now almost 800 cases in Vietnam, including in the capital Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, otherwise known as Saigon.
Epidemiologist Prof Michael Toole told the BBC it was difficult to pinpoint what "went wrong" with Vietnam's virus response. Rather, the sudden spike demonstrated something Melburnians know all too well: "once there's a little crack and the virus gets in it can just spread so quickly".
