We have been locked down for a month after a brief 11 day reprieve in June and my fear is that this is just going to continue forever. The solution they have to the "problem" each time is the same and the solution hasn't worked in the past so why not do it again? right? Makes perfect sense!
It isn't certain who said this first but someone once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result ... and this is precisely what Vietnam is doing right now.
If you'd like to know how it is that you can keep a country of 90 million people sheltered in place I'll go ahead and tell you in some easy steps how that is achievable.
- it isn't possible
- repeat the first step
Mass unemployment is happening now in this country that does not have the resources to give out free money to people who are no longer allowed to do their jobs. Crime will likely follow next as people get more and more desperate to simply make a living.
I am one of the fortunate few I suppose: I am able to work online but for a vast majority of people in Vietnam these lockdowns simply mean they can't make any money, yet believe it or not, people still need money in order to live.
At the start of all of this Vietnam didn't lock down anything and everything was fine and then somewhere along the line they decided to start testing a population that wasn't sick. Sure enough, when you start testing people with these tests a bunch of people started testing positive for Covid-19 and they were as surprised as anyone that they were positive.
Previously, the economy was thriving, people were happy and healthy; now they are neither.
Businesses are dropping like flies and as you would expect, it is the smaller "mom and pop" shops that are the first to crumble. The gigantic corporations will be just fine when the dust settles but in the meantime you can't open your shop because of a disease so deadly that you didn't know you had it until you tested positive for it.
Currently we were hopeful that the lockdown would end today but the government released a statement saying that there are 5 new cases of Covid in Da Nang, Vietnam (where I live) and therefore the lockdown will stay in place for another week. 5 cases out of over a million people? Seriously?
Let me do some quick math for you. This is .0005% of the entire population of this city and according to rumors, the people that tested positive didn't even feel sick, they were simply visiting people in the hospital that were there for other reasons and in order to get into the hospitals you are required to take a PCR test to get inside. It is because of these people that the entire city of Da Nang will be locked down for another week and a vast majority of the businesses that are hanging on by a thread are not allowed to be open.
At what point does all of this stop? Can you imagine if we treated any other illness this way?
Let's imagine for a second that Covid didn't have a 99% survival rate and that it is super-deadly... I don't think there are many people left that believe that it is - since we have been locked down already 4 times, and it didn't work those 4 times, why the F**K are we trying that same process that didn't work the other times in exactly the same fashion? Has this process worked anywhere else in the world? It doesn't appear as though it has and what are you going to do even if it did work? Stay locked down forever?
I'm fortunate I guess because I am not Vietnamese. I can leave any time that I want and maybe there are some people out there that would suggest, perhaps in a vicious fashion, that I do precisely that. I probably will soon because not being able to go anywhere or do anything without breaking the law (which I do on a regular basis) is just stupid.
I feel bad for the Vietnamese people though because this lunacy is probably going to carry on for quite some time into the future.
