For those living in the United States and Europe having just crossed over into quadruple digits as far as Covid cases are concerned probably seems like child's play. Also the fact that this country had zero Covid deaths until about a month ago and only just crossed over into having 25 deaths, there are some fundamental differences between this country and the United States as well as many other western countries.
This might come across as conspiracy theory-ish but when I look at USA and see the hundreds of thousands of cases (is it millions now? I honestly don't care to look) and how scores of thousands of people have died in a country that has god-like amounts of money and resources compared to here I start to think that someone, or perhaps everyone is lying.
Vietnam is FAR more densely populated with nearly 100 million people in a country that is 1/30th the geographic size of the USA. If you "squished" Vietnam, it would easily fit inside of Texas. So there goes any "wide open spaces" rebuttals. Also, Vietnam is next door to China and their borders were still open to China well into the problematic times. I know people that arrived in this country without being tested or even having their temperature taken until as late as mid March. How in the unholy hell is it possible that a country that is far more frequently visited by the Chinese than USA is just happens to end up having no deaths from Covid manage to do that?
So you mean to tell me that before Vietnam even started locking things down that the United States had many more times as many positive Covid cases as Vietnam has now, in August? Sorry, I don't buy it.
People will say stupid things like "Well mostly it was in heavily populated areas like New York City and Chicago."
NYC has around 18 million residents in the metropolitan area according to census data in 2018. Chicago has far less. Hanoi has 20 million and Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) has 21 million. The rest of the cities in Vietnam are much more populated than your average medium size city in USA as well. The populations also tend to gather in open and crowded spaces like outdoor markets, daily.
This idea that Asians were always wearing masks even before Covid is nonsense. I know, I was here years before anyone knew what Covid was and it was extremely rare to see anyone wearing a mask and if they were it was because the area stank or was polluted. It had almost nothing to do with disease or viruses.
I think there are definitely some nefarious things going on in the USA and the EU and a lot of this stems from relative affluence. You see, there never was, nor will there ever be, any sort of financial incentives for individuals, hospitals, or clinics to report a positive Covid test in Vietnam. If you have a positive Covid test here you will receive exactly $0 in government handouts.
When I hear these stories about clinics in Florida or wherever that reported that 90% of those tested came back with positive results, I feel as though someone is definitely trying to game the system. This is what happens when you financially incentivize something - people are going to lie.
There is also the case of number of deaths and some of the explanations I have heard about in the West are insane such as the guy who died in a motorcycle accident (again, in Florida - what are you guys doing down there?) and he was listed as a Covid death. To be fair they have been a little forthcoming as to how Covid deaths are being reported in that if you die from really anything else, but you test positive for Covid, you died from Covid. Whether or not you actually died from Covid doesn't seem to matter.
I bet it is actually much higher than this
I remember one politician or medical leader who said something along the lines of "if we had someone who was in hospice and was expected to live just another couple of weeks and when they die the test positive for Covid, it is reported as a Covid death... I hope this is helpful."
Here in Vietnam, they go out of their way to explain to the population all of the other things that the 25 reported deaths in the country had wrong with them when they died and there are zero cases of people who died exclusively from Covid. Most of the deaths were also people who were very old, and all of them had extensive problems with their health in other ways. Did Covid contribute to their death? Yes, would have just about anything else also killed them? Yes.
People could also talk about how USA is testing a lot more and I am sure that is true. If Vietnam doesn't know about it's actual numbers due to lack of testing that doesn't explain the complete absence of death. It simply isn't possible geographically speaking that this virus never made it into this country. Also, while we are locked down right now, possibly due to international pressure to "get on board with the failing global strategy" we had almost zero lockdown until about 3 weeks ago and very few people were wearing masks then too.
I just don't buy it at all.
Go ahead and slay me in the comments if you are one of the types that believes all this CDC / WHO crap. Educate me please! Because what I am seeing these days, doesn't make any sense to me at all.