Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam – Each phone call from Vietnam causes Thai Duong’s heart to skip a few beats.
For Duong, who grew up in District 4 of Ho Chi Minh City but currently lives in California, every contact with home poses the possibility of bad news. He has lost four family members to COVID-19 since Vietnam’s fourth wave turned the country’s containment of the virus from a success story to a nightmare.
No location has been worse hit than Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s biggest city, where Duong’s uncle died of COVID-19 on September 3 after he was placed in the hospital’s tiered system at the level for those in the most critical condition.
“The death rate at that level is 94 percent,” Duong told Al Jazeera.
“Everyone is struggling to survive. If they don’t have COVID already, they struggle to have food.”
Driven by the highly transmissible Delta variant, Vietnam’s fourth wave began on April 27. At the time, only 35 people had died of COVID-19 while the total number of infections stood just under 4,000. Today, there are more than 13,000 deaths, while case numbers top 520,000.
About 80 percent of fatalities and half the infections have occurred in Ho Chi Minh City.
Home to nine million people, Ho Chi Minh City has been under a total lockdown since August 23, with residents forbidden from leaving their homes even to shop for food. With the restrictions set to last until September 15, newly elected Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh has ordered mass testing for the city’s residents and deployed soldiers to enforce the stay at home orders and help with the delivery of food.
A woman looks out from behind an improvised barricade made of wooden planks and a ladder to restrict residents’ movements on August 30, 2021, in Hanoi, as part of the authorities’ plan to stop the spread of COVID-19 [File: Manan Vatsyayana/AFP]
Vietnamese military personnel stand guard at a checkpoint in Ho Chi Minh City on August 23, 2021, after the government imposed a stricter lockdown until September 16 to stop the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus [Pham Tho/AFP]Ho Chi Minh City’s once-bustling streets are now dotted with security checkpoints, some manned by soldiers armed with rifles.
“It is like martial law,” said a political analyst who did not want her name used. “Military people with guns like that is quite unprecedented.”
‘Depressing, heartbreaking’
But despite the strict measures, the number of infections continue to rise in Ho Chi Minh City and more than 200 people are dying every day. On Monday, the city reported more than 7,000 new cases and 233 deaths, rising from a caseload of 5,889 a week ago.
The surge has overwhelmed hospitals. Doctors and nurses from other parts of the country have rushed to Ho Chi Minh City to help treat infected people while the government has offered to pay recovered patients to stay at the hospital to help exhausted medical staff. Meanwhile, despite multiple field hospitals operating in the city, many COVID-19 patients have been forced to recuperate at home.
“It’s depressing. It’s heartbreaking,” said Trang, a 21-year-old medical volunteer who only gave her first name. “One doctor now has to treat maybe 200 to 1,000 patients.”
