They are basically paranoid about viruses and they have an extensive surveillance system
https://www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/how-did-vietnam-become-biggest-nation-without-coronavirus-deaths
https://www.axios.com/vietnam-coronavirus-pandemic-cases-economy-cee127ff-6aaa-4901-af82-7a0821e68150.html
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/12/vietnam-coronavirus-pandemic-success-repression/
Caroline Mills, who runs a small island resort near Hoi An, described on Twitter in late February how this surveillance worked in the case of one French visitor. According to Mills, the Frenchman had been flagged with a higher than normal temperature on arriving in Bangkok some 20 days earlier. After two days passing through Cambodia, he arrived in Vietnam. Unknown to him, the Vietnamese authorities monitored his entire journey through the country for 18 days. Within minutes of Mills logging his arrival at her hotel with the immigration service’s database, she received a call from the police. Officers were at the hotel to interview and test the Frenchman within 15 minutes.
The military has also played a role in Vietnam’s battle against the virus. Sixty-eight military camps with a capacity of 40,000 people were set up to receive people ordered into quarantine. Nguyen Khanh (whose name has been changed to protect her identity), a 19-year-old who returned from studying in the U.K. and was quarantined in one of the camps, said she was woken up at 6 a.m. each day by a loudspeaker blaring a song declaring, “Our lives are a military march.” Similar messages were also being broadcast outside the camp. Each morning, the loudspeakers found on every street corner in Hanoi were also praising the contributions of the military and law enforcement agencies in fighting the virus.
At the same time, the authorities were stepping up their efforts against unauthorized information. According to local news reports, between Jan. 23, when Vietnam detected its first case of infection, and mid-March, police censored around 300,000 posts on news sites and blogs and 600,000 posts on social media about COVID-19. During those two months, police took action against 654 cases of so-called fake news and sanctioned 146 people. The overlap between the techniques useful for fighting misinformation and those for squashing political criticism is obvious. Vietnam sits at 175th on the Reporters Without Borders 2020 World Press Freedom Index.
While some other Asian states, notably South Korea, have used phone tracking, credit card records, and video surveillance to trace the travel history of infected people, only Vietnam and China are able to combine such technologies with the street muscle to maintain direct personal control over large numbers of people. Only Vietnam and China are able to do so permanently and without the need to submit to legal or parliamentary oversight.
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