Epilogue: The Lessons from Covid-19 Management in Vietnam and Post-pandemic Prospects

The Covid-19 pandemic created a huge health, economic, social, and political shock on all countries and regions of the world. As a lower middle-income economy with a high population in the midst of complex transitions, Vietnam is particularly vulnerable to such complex shock. Yet, in the first year of the pandemic, Vietnam beat all forecasts and aced the response to the pandemic. Why was Vietnam able to do this? This concluding chapter argues that Vietnam was able to build on solid institutional capacity and high social resistance in crafting its response. However, the Delta and Omicron waves of 2021–2022 proved very costly to tackle, just as Vietnam was running out of capacity to keep its economy and society closed. Delays in getting access to vaccines also put Vietnam in a vulnerable spot in the Summer of 2021. The chapter reviews the health and economic performance of Vietnam throughout the pandemic. Vietnam has presented a robust response but faces deep challenges in the exit pathway from Covid: smoothing the health impact of exiting from zero-Covid, reconciling high health and social control with a position as hub in global value chains, and dealing with the risks and inequality from the acceleration of digitalization during Covid-19.