I have no idea what the government's official stance on masks are at the moment. I've asked a ton of people including the few Vietnamese friends that have and nobody really knows the answer to that at the moment. For the most part people are still masked up in most places but i've noticed as time goes by the more and more people are walking around without them on and I hope if this is a trend of some sorts, that it continues.
It wasn't that long ago that masks were required at the beach, even when you were in the water, which I found particularly amusing and ridiculous at the same time. In my mind this would only encourage drowning in a group of people that aren't exactly world class as far as their swimming skills are concerned.
Over time, the masks in the water malarky was eliminated, then you no longer had to wear masks on the sand unless you worked at one of the little bars there, and now signs instructing that you have to wear masks have been completely removed from the beach altogether. Most people on the sidewalk / boardwalk still wear masks unless they are at one of the cafes. I've always found this to be really stupid, if you are walking somewhere Covid gonna get ya! But if you sit down in exactly the same area Covid doesn't stand a chance!
The other day I walked into a popular 24 hour convenience mart that exists all over Vietnam called Full Market. This is only a hundred meters or so from my house and I am a regular there. I don't wear my mask on the walk to the place, but out of respect, I put it on when I enter the store... not because I believe the masks actually do anything, but because I don't want to be a jerk.
On this particular day as I approached the door I noticed that almost no one in the store had masks on and most of the people were Vietnamese. Also, there was a large group of Vietnamese people sitting outside drinking and eating snacks and none of them were masked. Therefore, I didn't wear my mask in the shop either and no one batted an eye including the staff.
Is this a sign that we will soon be free from this mask prison? I certainly hope so because even though I am a bit biased the best information I can find online comes to the conclusion that those cheap "dentist masks" that everyone wears have almost no chance of preventing the spread of Covid, even when worn correctly and most people including me, are not wearing them correctly. I have had the same mask for weeks and from what I have read, this is also a bad move.
The point is that I think that at least for my city, it looks like we might be headed towards people not wearing masks unless they elect to do so. In the past there were hefty fines for people that didn't wear one and I even heard a few stories about people being fined for wearing it improperly and not covering their nose.
Once that step is done maybe we can also get rid of these really silly screens that exist in many retail environments but are completely missing from any other sort of business. In my local convenience store, most people approach from the side anyway because they can't hear the clerk through it.
While I don't want anyone to get sick I think at some point we need to at least consider that these precautions accomplish little to nothing other than to inconvenience people. I'm still going to wear a mask when I am around locals who are doing so because if there is one thing that I have learned in the past from being an expat, locals will quickly point the finger at foreigners any time anything goes wrong. This isn't Vietnam specific, my own country does the same thing as it seems we blame almost everything on Mexico or Russia without paying much attention to whether or not they actually did anything.
I look forward to the day when Vietnam will join a lot of the rest of the world in returning to normal like they were before all this began 2 years ago (has it been longer than that? I've stopped counting.)