Drawing on past lessons to tackle new challenges
In the past two decades, Vietnam has dealt with numerous health crises caused by infectious diseases, including SARS, avian influenza, measles and dengue fever. In 2003, it was one of the first countries to report SARS infection after the disease emerged in Guangdong, China. The country’s strategies, which included isolation, contact tracing and implementing new border measures like testing at airports, proved immensely successful. So successful in fact that Vietnam was the first country to be declared by the WHO to have contained the SARS-CoV virus.
This experience paved the way for Vietnam’s success in managing later disease outbreaks like avian influenza A/H5N1 when it spread to humans in late 2003. Now, nearly two decades later, in what seems like a déjà-vu scenario, Vietnam is drawing on lessons learned to contain yet another zoonotic virus outbreak.
Mai acknowledges that her experience studying SARS-CoV and avian influenza in 2003 poised her and her team to take on the challenge of deciphering the mysteries of COVID-19 at a time when little was known about the disease, what was causing it and how it was being transmitted.
“Learning from SARS-CoV, H5N1 and other viruses in the past has made me more confident to work with SARS-CoV-2, because we understand the risks of working with new pathogens,” remarked Mai.
This experience paid off quickly. On February 7, the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology announced that its researchers had successfully isolated the SARS-CoV-2 virus, as they had done for SARS-CoV and A/H5N1 before. This made Vietnam the fourth country outside of China to have isolated the virus, after Australia, Japan and Singapore.
This work led to the development of at least four local COVID-19 tests by early March. Rapid commercialization by private companies quickly followed and thousands of test kits were delivered across the country to quickly enhance testing capacity. As a result, the number of laboratories capable of confirming COVID-19 tests rose from four in late January to more than 250 by August, said Mai.
Despite the development of their own test kits, Vietnam has not adopted the expensive mass-testing strategies of neighboring South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. The country has instead relied heavily on localized lockdowns and wide testing of those in areas with confirmed cases.
Mai’s research also means that Vietnam is prepared to test a local COVID-19 vaccine when one becomes available.
“We are also using our SARS-CoV-2 strains to develop neutralization assays, which are essential for evaluating an immune response to locally developed COVID-19 vaccines,” she added.
