The first case of the UK variant of the virus was discovered in Hai Duong province on 28 January and quickly spread to 13 provinces and cities throughout Vietnam, resulting in over 791 new community cases since the beginning of this third wave.
The sensitive timing of the outbreak elevated health and safety concerns as many Vietnamese had travel plans for reunions and family festivities. The government issued several social isolation orders in major cities, limiting inbound and outbound travel. The Ministry of Health and the World Health Organization’s office in Vietnam recommended people celebrate Tet safely with the message that ‘health is the most precious gift we can give each other this Tetholiday’.
Tet is prime time for increased spending thanks to a long tradition of gift-giving, drinking and dining with friends and family, and sprucing up the home for the holidays. The health measures and social distancing orders therefore dampened the Vietnamese economy, which had shown promising signs of recovery after recovering from the first two waves of COVID-19.
Amid this looming crisis, more and more Vietnamese turned to e-commerce platforms and digital financial services for Tet preparation. Tiki, one of the four largest online shopping platforms in Vietnam, reported that its transaction volume in January surged 50 per cent compared to the same period last year. Due to the new outbreak leading up to Tet, it is likely that all e-commerce platforms experienced a massive surge in activity. The National Payment Corporation of Vietnam (NAPAS) reported a significant surge in the numbers of transactions in e-commerce and interbank funds transfers since 28 January, continuing to rise after the holidays.
Many Vietnamese businesses and services have also taken measures such as speeding up digital transformation projects and offering new services to meet this new demand. ZaloPay, one of Vietnam’s largest electronic wallets, strongly promoted its ‘li xi’ service, a new digital approach to the tradition of elderly people giving lucky money to children. Many supermarkets, including Big C and Coop Mart, teamed up with digital wallets and online shopping platforms for marketing campaigns to promote online shopping and delivery services for Tet preparation.
These campaigns are gaining traction and could potentially help companies expand their customer bases as they address health and safety concerns. Such concerns have been an important driver of the surge in usage of e-commerce and digital financial services, especially among elderly consumers, during the last two waves of COVID-19 in Vietnam.
The COVID-19 pandemic, for all its negative impacts on health, society and economy, is expediting the growth of Vietnamese e-commerce and digital finance, paving the way for the country to fulfill its digital potential. Traffic on e-commerce platforms in 2020 was 150 per cent higher than the previous year, with approximately 3.5 million visitors per day on various platforms.
Usage of digital financial services, including internet banking, e-wallets and mobile money, have also risen significantly, placing Vietnam among the top three countries in Southeast Asia for e-commerce growth. Revenue in the sector is projected to reach US$7 billion in 2021, an increase of 16.2 per cent year-on-year. The number of users is expected to rise 13.5 per cent year-on-year to 51.8 million, with an average revenue of US$135 per user.
Since living with the virus will likely become the new normal following the pandemic, health and safety concerns will remain important factors influencing consumers’ online shopping behaviour. Firms can quickly reinvent their processes and services to survive and even benefit from the pandemic by addressing these concerns. This also highlights the importance of digital transformation, which helps establish and maintain a stable channel for businesses and services despite disruptions from unpredictable shocks like COVID-19.
Digital health is another area the healthcare industry should pay attention to going forward. Demand for consumer health electronics and telemedicine are rising strongly in Vietnam amid growing challenges from infectious diseases such as COVID-19 as well as from non-communicable diseases.
What has been seen in both consumers’ behavioural changes and in business’ strategies strongly points towards faster digital transformation in businesses and services due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is also encouraging that businesses in Vietnam have transformed in a way that better supports equal access to healthcare, enhanced safety measures and stronger collaboration across industries. This spurs the digital transformation that is essential for emerging economies like Vietnam.
Quan Vu Le is Director of the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI) Academy, Fulbright University Vietnam.
Jason Quang Nguyen is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Circular Economy Development, Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City.
This article is part of an EAF special feature series on the novel coronavirus crisis and its impact.
Former Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who served during the Trump administration, said on Sunday that the pandemic is “spiraling out of control yet again,” as cases begin to rise and the country’s vaccination rate plateaus.
“More mitigation is coming, whether it’s masking or whether it’s closures or whether it’s your kids having to return to virtual learning, that is coming. And it’s coming because this pandemic is spiraling out of control yet again, and it’s spiraling out of control because we don’t have enough people vaccinated,” Adams told host John Dickerson on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“So get vaccinated because it helps your neighbors, but get vaccinated because it’s going to help every single American enjoy the freedoms that we want to return to,” Adams continued.
More than 163 million people in the U.S. are fully inoculated against COVID-19, which translates to 49.1 percent of the total population, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC reports that 56.8 percent of the U.S. population has received at least one dose of the vaccine.
Cases have been on the rise in recent weeks, however, as the highly infectious delta variant spreads through the country. The surge in infections have mainly affected those who have not been vaccinated.
Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, said on Sunday in a separate interview that COVID-19 has become an “outbreak among the unvaccinated.”
Vaccine hesitancy is still proving to be a hurdle in reaching herd immunity, as sectors of the population remain steadfast in their opposition to getting inoculated.
Adams told Dickerson that one of the quickest ways to increase the country’s inoculation rate and reduce vaccine hesitancy is by getting the shots fully authorized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Currently, the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are all available through the FDA’s emergency use authorization.
During the second half year of 2019, unexpected pandemic which was caused by a coronavirus attacked the earth, infecting 230 million people,according to the WHO data, taking 4.7 millions’ life. The virus looks like the corona under the microscope of scientists,hence the name coronavirus. Coronavirus is widespread in the nature, and most of it are harmless. But COVID-19, also knonwn as SARS-Cov-II, is the third type of coronavirus bringing disasters to human being. The first one is SARS, and the second one is MERS.
The old are major dead victims of COVID-19 and they mainly die of loss of lung function and complications caused by Hypoxemia etc, leaving people in the first widespread pandemic in the century since 1918 Spanish flu. Unfortunately, the whole world can’t unite to fight against COVID-19 but find ourselves in the mire of blame and vituperation. What happened since the outbreak of COVID-19 was just like what was predicted in Event 201 organized by CDC and CIA in 18th October 2019, rummor predominated the Internet and every corner of the society, making people impossible to tell the truth from the lies.