Several members of the extended family in different parts of the country had unambiguous symptomatic COVID cases. Every last one was 1) never tested and 2) even

Several members of the extended family in different parts of the country had unambiguous symptomatic COVID cases. Every last one was 1) never tested and 2) even the people with severe cases were turned away by the government hospitals, not even a cursory exam. You can get into the hospitals and get tested with a sufficiently large bribe, but the market clearing price for that bribe was unusually high so few people can afford it. The practical reality is that the government hospitals couldn't do anything even if you paid it, so why would you? People with enough money to pay that bribe would be using the foreign hospitals anyway. Initially they did do severe lockdowns but the virus escaped into the population not long after and it was a lost cause. Realize that even though the lockdowns were severe, just about every such mandate is optional if you have money, both in theory and practice. The above reporting isn't particularly credible. Having worked for the UN and been involved in the sausage-making at international NGOs, it would be a mistake to treat their outputs as a scientific fact-finding mission. Outputs are virtually always in service of narrow political or economic objectives that may be unrelated to the topic of the report, they aren't written for the purpose of conveying information per se. It is a formal writing style that makes heavy use of selective omissions. Some countries were successful at containing COVID. In the specific case of Viet Nam, it would take a relatively naive review of the evidence to come to that conclusion. It may be authoritarian but it is much more corrupt and disorganized than many of the other "hard lockdown" countries.