It has recently been brought to my attention that a few members of the expat community did not turn up for the mandatory Covid-19 testing that the city of Da Nang implemented for the 2200 expat residents that live in this city. This, in my mind, is monumentally stupid for many reasons, but in particular the fact that the city has a register of all expats and they definitely know that these people did not turn up.
They really couldn't have made it any easier for us than they did. They set up areas for testing in the parts of the city with large expat populations, set aside days that ONLY foreigners were being tested, they gave us many days of advance notice and they had an army of fluent translators on site. They did all of this while being extremely friendly to all of us, even when we broke protocol because we didn't understand the system, and they did this all for us at the grand total price of nada. $0 out of pocket expense for the people who are already staying here an extended no-nonsense, hassle-free amnesty visa period that again, has no cost associated with it.
Two of these people live in my building and the police and medical team came to get them today. While I don't know the exact details, all the friendliness that existed during the two days of free service has gone out the window. They are going to be fined, and now they are on a list of people that must procure flights out of the country as soon as they are available. To make matters worse for this couple, they are not the same nationality and they are not married, so they are going to be separated.
One will be forced to fly back to USA and the other to the U.K. Even though I like both of these people I have zero sympathy for them. They are also (reportedly) going to be blacklisted from re-entering Vietnam for an extended period of time (likely many years.)
All of this is their own stupidity. The entire process took 2 hours from start to finish, they made it as comfortable as possible and by the time it was over you didn't miss much out of your day since all of us are under a form of house arrest anyway. The location of the testing from my condo is something we can all see from our balconies. There was literally no reason for these two to not go.
I would understand if they didn't want to participate in a mandatory vaccination and there would be human rights lawyers in international law that would definitely agree with them. But they were opposed to having some blood drawn and having a swab test - both of which took about 4 minutes time total once you got to the front of the line... and it was free.
Now, they are going to be facing forced repatriation at an extremely elevated cost since the few flights that are traveling to their respective countries are about 5 times the cost that they normally would be. They also might end up facing quarantine in their home countries, not to mention the fact that they will not be allowed to come back to this country for quiet some time, if ever.
They are almost certainly NOT covid positive either since very few cases were actually discovered when Da Nang made the decision to test every single person who lives in the city which is around a million people.
So what did you guys accomplish huh? I certainly hope the press doesn't get a hold of this because the end result could be that the local community starts to have a negative opinion of foreigners, even though this latest outbreak doesn't have anything to do with us.
Way to go... idiots!