When I wake up in the morning and open my window, a thought flashes through my mind that what I see outside is not real at all but is in fact a nightmare. Seconds later, as I look at my city—deserted, abandoned, unrecognisable—the nightmare is the reality. The city that never sleeps has become a ghost town.

I hear sirens blaring in the streets. I read reports of people dying, many at home and without any medical care or support. Thousands of people are fleeing from the once most vibrant city in Vietnam. Millions have lost their jobs and now struggle for their basic meals.

Before the pandemic, in Vietnam’s most populous city, you could eat whatever you wanted at any time. Food stalls, restaurants, bars and pubs were everywhere. Cuisines and drinks from all over the world could be found: Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Middle Eastern, Latin American. Noodles of all kinds, bread, local snacks, bubble tea, coffee were just a stone’s throw away. The streets were crowded with people, and foreigners often were startled, and scared of, the traffic jams, which were an everyday reality for us. People ate, drank, sang, laughed and worked around the clock. My neighbour played the saxophone to the sounds of people talking throughout my apartment building. La perle de l’Extrême-Orient never slept. Today that is all but a memory. The noises and the crowds we sometimes complained about are gone and silence reigns as Ho Chi Minh City goes through the worst health crisis of recent memory.

It has been one year since I returned from Europe, which then was the hotspot of the pandemic. After eight months of living in quarantine and lockdown in Spain, being back in Vietnam was what I longed for. Everything was the same as when I had left the country two years earlier. Things seemed normal. Sometimes we heard about someone catching the virus, which made the national news. They numbered every patient; patient number 2,000, for instance. But we continued to go to bars and pubs, gathered in big groups, partied, went to work, as if Covid-19 wasn’t a thing to be afraid of. Many of us thought that it could never really affect us in the way it affected others around the world. We lived in a Covid-free utopia. Thousands of Vietnamese living abroad flooded home.

When Covid-19 finally struck, it hit very hard. As I write, the number of cases nationwide is 336,654. In Ho Chi Minh City alone, the number is 171,801. Across the country 7,540 people have died, with 5,939 from Ho Chi Minh City. Some suggest that the number might be even higher because many who died at home won’t have been counted as deaths from Covid-19. Hundreds of people die every day, unhospitalised because there aren’t enough beds. The health system is collapsing. Medical staff are exhausted. People around me are desperate, exasperated, depressed, hopeless and angry.

Vietnam, an agricultural powerhouse that exports its produce to every corner of the world, is struggling to feed its people. The government has tried to calm people by repeating again and again that the supply of food is secured, that no one will be hungry. But this is not the case. In supermarkets I have visited, many shelves were empty. I once went to three supermarkets to look for eggs. In the southern capital, an egg is hard to find.

The current crisis shows the incompetence and inhumanity of many government officials. As the number of cases started to rise in May, the local government wanted to apply Directive 16, the strictest lockdown order, which would restrict all non-essential activities, but the central government in Hanoi wouldn’t have a bar of it. Why? Because Ho Chi Minh City is the breadwinner of the country. The city and its metropolitan area, which includes Binh Duong and Dong Nai provinces, account for nearly 40 per cent of Vietnam’s gross domestic product. Hanoi didn’t want to trade off that money, even if it would (and did) put millions of lives at risk. Now it is failing both, lives and money.

Moreover, the way in which the central and local governments are handling the crisis shows a pattern of inconsistency and stupidity. For instance, the authorities considered tampons non-essential and therefore prohibited from inter-district deliveries; elderly people who have vaccination appointments can’t attend them because police don’t want to take the ‘risk’ of letting people out. People are fined if they are on their way to supermarkets without ‘tickets’ specifically issued for the purpose, yet in the district where I live, the officials don’t give us the tickets.

The government has said it set aside thousands of billions of dong for what it calls ‘emergency support’, designed to help low-income workers and small businesses. From what I have observed, however, very few people can access this support due to either the quantity of paperwork involved or the notoriously inefficient bureaucratic system. The cleaning lady who used to help us four hours a week told us by phone that she has applied twice for financial support because she can’t go to work, but she hasn’t received anything. She isn’t an exception; millions of people are in the same boat.

As I’m writing this, I’m living the trauma and depression again. Those feelings of hopelessness and despair return when I see thousands of people who, having lost their jobs and incomes, are fleeing Ho Chi Minh City and returning to their villages, to find shelter and food, to find refuge in the arms of their families and relatives.

At the same time, I also hear about many young people receiving vaccine jabs that they weren’t entitled to. Those same young people are well off. They can stay at home comfortably, and can work from home. I read about a young, rich and healthy woman who got the Pfizer jab just because her father is a professor at the Military Academy of Medicine. Apparently, the medical worker who gave her the shot was punished for following his senior manager. A journalist friend in Hanoi told me that some vaccination centres were selling ‘privately’ a dose of Moderna vaccine for 5 million dong (around US$220). I have a friend, a wealthy landlord, who got the jab because her father used to work at the city’s Communist Party Committee.

In the meantime, many frontline volunteers aren’t inoculated. People are dying, people are getting sick without proper treatment: people in need who don’t get the help the government promised it would deliver; those who live from hand to mouth, who can’t afford to survive without going to work. Heartbreaking anecdotes are everywhere.

In this bleak time, while the government fails, I find hope in what normal people around me are doing to help each other. People share food from their fridges with others in need, or offer money, medicine, oxygen concentrators, mental health support. Better-off people are doing great things to help, like driving sick people to hospital when hotlines are overloaded. They help with delivering water and medicine, and basic staples like rice, eggs and vegetables. People share tips online to help patients with mild symptoms to take care of themselves at home. They care for their countrymen and women and do everything to help. It’s what gives me, and many others, hope that we will see the light at the end of the tunnel. There is a Vietnamese proverb that goes: mandarins are temporary, the people are forever.

Khai Q. Nguyen is a Vietnamese writer based in Ho Chi Minh City.

By https://mekongreview.com/