Ho Chi Minh City during the fourth wave of COVID-19 in Vietnam

Vietnam was a remarkable COVID-19 success story, logging zero cases for months on end and keeping life close to normal for much of the population. For much of the pandemic, cases and deaths per 100,000 remained among the lowest in the world (Dong, Du and Gardner 2020, 533-534). But in late April 2021, the highly transmissible Delta variant began to take hold in Vietnam and Hồ Chí Minh City - the country’s economic engine, where 13 million people live and work - is now the locus of struggle against the virus: amid mass testing many thousands of cases are logged daily. Social distancing measures used to control previous variants have proven ineffective against the virulent Delta strain, and this prompted the Vietnamese authorities to impose increasingly strict lockdowns (Figure 1) and scale back contact tracing efforts to focus on treating the sick entering hospitals. This dispatch, written in late July 2021, offers first-hand observations from Vietnam’s megacity as the country’s fourth wave of COVID-19 hit. It draws on conversations with city dwellers as they try to make sense of huge disruption in their daily lives and suggests lessons that can be drawn from this phase of Hồ Chí Minh City’s COVID-19 experience that may interest readers studying pandemic responses in other cities.