An article on March 26 by a medical doctor in Hanoi warned that the actual number of Covid-19 infections was much higher than the official announced one because of pressure to hide the real number. At the same time Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam stated his determination that Vietnam would not allow the number of the infected to increase to 1,000 cases before March 31.
A medical doctor at the Germany-Vietnam Friendship Hospital acted like whistleblower like Li Wenliang in Wuhan when made a warning that the number of infected cases was much higher than the announced number by the Ministry of Health. “Every morning we open the news and read that the positive numbers keep increasing, today it’s just over 50 tomorrow and 65 the other day to 90..vv .. but that number we should just from the perspective of authority, the Ministry of Health has discovered and is being isolated and treated. The actual number of people infected in the community today may be much higher,” he said.
The article on the Facebook page of nearly 130,000 followers of MD Tran Quoc Khanh, who works at the Germany-Vietnam Friendship Hospital on March 26, has been well received and shared by the community on Social Networks, but after one day, it was removed with an apology that “the statistics are inaccurate-unverified” and “causing psychological confusion in the community.”
However, the content of this article is very authentic and valuable – not exactly like an apology, but perhaps this medical doctor was under pressure from a superior or from the Government of Vietnam to remove the post and publish his apologies on Facebook.
Particularly, MD Khanh’s apology also received nearly 1,000 comments, most of which expressed sympathy and thought that what he wrote is true, there is no need to apologize. Some people blame that the doctor should have bravely kept his point of view, should not back down from government pressure.
The medical doctor wrote: “Please don’t count the number of people infected each day anymore (it is just the tip of a terrible sinking iceberg), please do not query the history of travel and contact of any patient, that the government will do.”
“With infectious pathology, the causative agent is extremely small, invisible to the naked eye, but quietly spread & contagious, to some extent it will explode with thousands of cases,” he warned.
He also warned that the “false negative” situation is extremely dangerous today: “The authorities and every citizen in the locality that is now ‘negative’ should also prepare for epidemic situations in the near future, because in the incubation period most people go home and also the highest stage of infection. Please refrain from face-to-face meetings and group gatherings now because people may be in the ‘false negative’ stage.”
He said the actual number of infections is much higher: “Why is that? A large number of foreigners from affected areas have come to Vietnam and enter the country when they may be carrying pathogens but are in the incubation period, heat system checks or medical declarations have caught a small number of the infected and failed with the remaining infected ones. The situation is the same with Vietnamese people returning to the homeland. In addition, among the more than 140 positive people today, they have been detected positive after days in which they were freely travelling and contecting with others. In addition, a number of people carrying out the pathogen without having symptoms and they are also sources for spreading.
Today I have seen a CT scan from a shared imaging diagnostic doctor. She informed that the lung damage was very specific to Wuhan Flu in the background of a patient with respiratory tract infection, but that person had a negative test for Wuhan Flu.”
“We accept to take a step back, accept losses, accept difficulties during this time, otherwise we will have to pay higher prices if we are not careful now in dealing with the pandemic,” he concluded.
I his speech on March 27, DPM Dam, head of the National Steering Committee for Wuhan Influenza Prevention and Control said that if persistent anti-epidemic measures have been implemented for a long time, Viet Nam will not be in the scenario of increasing to 1,000 Covid-19 patients by March 31.
According to Vu Duc Dam’s analysis based on world statistics, the average time for the number of Wuhan Flu infections to increase from 100 to 1,000 is 9 days, except for Japan at 28. So, by this calculation , Vietnam recorded 100 new cases on March 22, but by March 31, Vietnam is likely to have 1,000 infected cases.
However, Dam confirmed that there will be no 1,000 cases at the time as planned. The reason is because the solutions of Vietnam up to now are still very effective.
Independent journalist Pham Thanh, who previously worked in the Vietnamese state-run media system, commented:
“The communist disease is never knowing what the objective truth is, always operating, naming, preventing outbreak according to the regime’s will. In order to effectively deal with the pandemic, you need clear plan with proper resources. You cannot cope with them just by empty words.”
At 18:30 on March 29, the Hanoi City’s Department of Health announced an additional 14 cases of Wuhan Flu, bringing the total number of Wuhan virus infections in Vietnam to 188 patients.
Agreeing with journalist Pham Thanh, blogger Nguyen Ngoc Gia in Saigon argues:
“There are inconsistent words of the regime’s leadership, including Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and DMP Vu Duc Dam regarding the fight against the current Wuhan virus outbreak. I was not surprised because the communist tradition is always silencing the truth. The proof is that Nguyen Xuan Phuc’s words are that the disease is growing at an ‘unpredictable’ level, I think there is even more serious information about the disease that they are still hiding from the Vietnamese people.”
Earlier, the local newspaper reported that during the Covid-19 pandemic prevention and control meeting of the Politburo took place at the Party Central headquarters on March 20, General Secretary and President Nguyen Phu Trong praised the leadership and direction very timely, alert and drastic.
According to the head of the Communist Party and the State of Vietnam, both the political system and the entire population joined to cope with the pandemic and achieved positive results.
It was also the first time Mr. Trong chaired a meeting on prevention and control of the Covid-19 pandemic after nearly 2 months of official pandemic to be officially present in Vietnam.
The day before, Trong appeared to preside over a meeting on party personnel. This is also the latest public appearance of Mr. Trong since February 27.
Talking about the role of Mr. Trong, who is headed the Vietnam Party of more than 4 million members and also the President of Vietnam with 96 million Vietnamese in the fight against Wuhan Flu, journalist Pham Thanh said:
“Seeing a very strange phenomenon in the world, no man has led the country in this global pandemic but dare not open his mouth to speak. Meanwhile, he is only worried about his Party, but if he really worried about the Party, we do not know. Because the image about the meeting posted on the Internet is an old picture. So I think he is not healthy enough to run the country, the other is that his military forces flatter him so he doesn’t want to resign, the third is that he is strongly supported by the red China which wants him to stay in his post.”
For these reasons, journalist Pham Thanh said that due to China’s influence, the current prevention of the Chinese pandemic is also in the way that China has set out.
Journalist Pham Thanh continued: “Vietnam remains silent when thousands, millions, tens of thousands of people from China entered Vietnam and the regime did not talk about infection but wait for people coming from the Western countries. It is China’s scenario which aims to blame the US for spreading Covid-19 outbreak.”
Blogger Nguyen Ngoc Gia expressed his belief that the disease would eventually pass, but that it would also lead to a complete political, economic crisis and especially a crisis of people’s faith in the ruling communist regime.
“They kept doing the anti-epidemic campaign with political determination, I thought it was very naive and it did not work. We live in Vietnam, I live in Saigon but do not have any practical support apart from the many messages from the Ministry of Health, the Government, the Ministry of Information and Communications. The most important thing today is that I don’t believe in the numbers of people infected, especially the number of deaths provided by the regime.”
Hoang Lan from Hanoi – Thoibao.de (Translated)
