Here in Vietnam the lack of the virus spreading has always remained a mystery to me in that I didn't see how it was possible that this virus was running wild all over the rest of the world but the relatively poor country with less-than-top-notch health care was managing the pandemic better than almost all of the rest of the world - or so it would appear.
We managed this all without being locked down a great deal, and even during the 1 time that we were locked down it wasn't anywhere near as extreme as some of the rules that I heard about in USA and Canada where they were kicking down doors to break up Grandma's Christmas dinner or anything like that.
We have had near absolute freedom for all but 3 weeks since the pandemic started, and even when we were locked down coast to err, the borders with other countries, we could still do stuff, you just had to be masked. This was for a mere 3 weeks too so basically as long as you didn't need to leave the country outside of those 3 weeks, life has been the same as it always was here in Vietnam.
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This isn't some tiny remote village I live in either, there are over a million people here
Now for people in the super metropolitan areas of Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi this was a different story: Those guys got locked down in a much more hardcore sense but even in these situations it wasn't the sort of lockdowns that much of the western world has seen.
I'm not sure exactly what happened, but after the holiday weekend happened and all the visitors returned to their home cities, the government decided that we were going to lock down again. This hasn't been too terribly harsh, but it is the first time in a long time that we have had any sort of mandates at all. Wearing a mask was completely elective for everywhere that I ever went outside of the entrance / exits of the shopping malls. Once past the gate sentinels, basically everyone took their masks off, Vietnamese and foreigner alike.
The rules during what is going on now are pretty relaxed and it went into effect 3 days ago at midnight, exactly after the conclusion of the holiday and 4-day weekend. I say that it is pretty relaxed in that a lot of places are still open and I was sitting with friends at two different establishments yesterday drinking beers. Some places are still open while others have been forced to shut. The decision seems kind of arbitrary about which to close and which to not close and most of the places that have been unaffected by the government are smaller organizations.
There is also a very stiff penalty for mask violations although I am yet to hear about anyone who has been charged with this, let alone the maximum penalty. For your average local this amount of money is so high you might as well ask them to pay a $100 billion fine because both are completely out of reach so it does seem to be more of a threat than anything else.
I wear my mask whenever I leave my house because I am not trying to cause any problems and I certainly don't want a standoff with any sort of official. I mentioned a couple of times that some hard-headed neighbors of mine were deported about 8 months ago for doing exactly that. Nah, I'd rather stay here and just comply, thanks.
There hasn't been any indication about how long this is going to last and while the information is out there about why this is happening at all the only word I have heard is that a single person tested positive somewhere and now they are going to all the places that he visited and testing all of those people too.
So I guess what I am saying here is that Vietnam's unbeaten streak in the world of no lockdowns has come to an end. It really isn't that bad because we could probably use a week or two of the bars being shut anyway - well, I could use it, that's for sure. I suppose I'll use this time to catch up on my PS4 backlog of games that I downloaded and haven't played yet or perhaps to find a new series that doesn't absolutely suck on Netflix. If you have any suggestions I would appreciate it.