Shares forecast to face correction pressure but opportunities still exist as the bottom-catching cash flow has returned to some stocks that reached the bottom in July.

The stock market will be closed on Thursday and Friday this week on the occasion of the Independence Day of Việt Nam (September 2), meaning that it will open for trading on only three days from September 30 to September 1.

The VN-Index climbed 0.93 per cent to close Friday at 1,313.20 points. The index had lost a total of 1.22 per cent last week.

Related: Here are the risks of Vietnam’s economic outlook you should know

Việt Dragon Securities Joint Stock Company (VDSC) said that although the VN-Index ended last Friday with a strong increase, the market was still in an accumulation phase, after a sharp decline in the previous week.

“More cash flow had returned to the stock market with many stocks continuing to rise strongly, which meant the cash flow was still moving continuously and always looking for investment opportunities,” Việt Dragon said.

“In the current period, investors can hold good stocks or find more opportunities to invest in the short term,” it said.

MB Securities Joint Stock Company (MBS) said the VN-Index had a positive recovery session at the end of last week, with the rebound of blue chips beside the rises of small and medium-sized stocks. The 1,290 – 1,300 point zone had become a strong support zone.

Investors could restructure part of their portfolio to the blue-chip group after the cash flow returned to bottom fishing with some stocks reaching the bottom in July, MBS recommended.

Also read: It’s not just the global manufacturing supply chains being strained, coffee supplies are suffering by Vietnam’s virus curbs

SSI Securities Joint Stock Company (SSI) said that the VN-Index would continue to increase this week. However, because it was still in a short-term downtrend, the index would soon face correcting pressure when the VN-Index was heading to the resistance area near 1,340 points.

“The nearest support area for VN-Index is at 1,300-1,292 points,” it said.

Saigon-Hanoi Securities Joint Stock Company (SHS) said from a technical point of view, the VN-Index was still moving in a correcting phase and there was still room for a decrease.

“The market is likely to continue the technical recovery at the beginning of this week, before continuing to correct to lower price ranges. The notable resistance zone is currently in the range of 1,335-1,340 points,” SHS forecast.

“Investors who still have a large proportion of stocks can watch for technical recovery to reduce the proportion. Investors who had taken profits in the short-term portfolios earlier should continue to observe and disburse when the market corrects in a strong support zone in the range of 1,200-1,250 points,” SHS said.

In the context that the COVID-19 pandemic is still spreading and social distancing measures have a negative impact on the economy, the stock market still lacks supportive factors in September, according to Phan Dũng Khánh, director of the investment consultancy department at Maybank Kim Eng Securities Co Ltd.

“Even countries that have implemented vaccination campaigns on a large scale and reopened their economies have seen their economies begin to decelerate, supply chains are disrupted, inflation is still accelerating,” he said.

“The macroeconomic indicators of the third quarter are predicted to be pessimistic and even the business results of enterprises are forecast to be lower than the first two quarters of this year. However, there are still groups of industries that benefited from the pandemic,” said Nguyễn Hồng Khanh, head of market analysis at Việt Nam International Securities Joint Stock Company (VIS).

“Investors often don’t focus too much on the third quarter’s results but rather more on the whole year’s business results,” he said.

“Companies in industries that benefit from the pandemic such as securities, nitrogen fertilisers and logistics will still grow, although the level may slow down a bit compared to the second quarter,” he said.

Last week, banking stocks dropped the most with losers such as Saigon-Hanoi Bank (SHB) down 1.8 per cent, VPbank (VPB) losing 2.1 per cent, Vietcombank (VCB) declining 2.3 per cent, Bank for Investment and Development of Vietnam (BID) down 4.4 per cent, Vietinbank (CTG) losing 4.7 per cent, Techcombank (TCB) falling 4.9 per cent, Asia Commercial Bank (ACB) slumping 5.5 per cent, and Military Bank (MBB) down 6.4 per cent.

They were followed by financial and real estate stocks such as Vingroup (VIC) decreasing by 3 per cent, Vinhomes (VHM) losing by 1.1 per cent, Saigon Securities Inc (SSI) falling 2.1 per cent, and Viet Capital Inc (VCI) declining 3.7 per cent.

By Vietnam News

Related

Source: Vietnam Insider

Liquidity being improved and strong inflows from foreign investments.

However, as the benchmark VN-Index struggled at the resistance level of 1,350 points and fell in the last session, many securities firms have to take a more cautious view on the market this week. 

On the Hồ Chí Minh Stock Exchange (HoSE), the VN-Index closed last week at 1,341.45 points, marking the first fall in two weeks. Meanwhile, the HNX-Index on the Hà Nội Stock Exchange (HNX) was stable at 325.46 points. 

For the week, the VN-Index still gained 2.1 per cent, while the HNX-Index rose by 3.3 per cent. 

The market liquidity on both exchanges was higher than the week before, but still lower than the 20-day moving average. The average liquidity was VNĐ23.8 trillion (US$1.03 billion) per session. 

Trading value on HOSE climbed by 21 per cent to VNĐ102.7 trillion, equivalent to an increase of 25.7 per cent in volume to over 3.2 billion shares, while the trading value on HNX inched 53.6 per cent higher to VNĐ16.7 trillion, equivalent to an increase of 50.2 per cent in volume to 668 million shares.

According to Viet Dragon Securities Corporation (VDSC), the market benchmark still couldn’t break over the resistance level of 1,350 points in the last trading session of the week and dropped slightly. The liquidity in this session increased compared to previous sessions and was higher than the average of the last 50 sessions, showing that investors were taking advantage of the rapid recovery to take profits in the short-term.

The VN-Index is expected to continue to struggle at the resistance level and may correct. However, the correction, if any, is only for rebalancing the market after completing the recovery, the securities firm added.

Therefore, investors should temporarily rebalance their portfolios and take profits on stocks that are under great resistance. At the same time, investors should seek investment opportunities to disburse when the market is balanced and stable again, VDSC recommended. 

Meanwhile, Mirae Asset Securities Việt Nam said that investors’ bullish sentiment was reflected in a series of four consecutive gaining sessions at the beginning of last week. 

In the last session, the VN-Index touched the threshold of 1,350 points in the early session with the positive market breadth. However, selling pressure, which suddenly surged in the afternoon session, dragged the benchmark away from this important resistance level. 

During the week, foreign investors flocked back to the market as they net bought in all five sessions with a total value of more than VNĐ2.4 trillion. Of which, Vinhomes JSC (VHM) was in first place in the net buying list with a value of nearly VNĐ1 trillion, far ahead of the second and third positions of Sacombank (STB) and SSI Securities Corporation (SSI) with a value of VNĐ602 billion and VNĐ522 billion, respectively. 

On the net selling front, Vingroup JSC (VIC) witnessed the largest net sell value of VNĐ340 billion.

Mirae Asset said that after recovery of nearly 120 points in three weeks, the VN-Index is facing short-term resistance at 1,350 points. Next week, the market is likely to be under short-term correcting pressure and the nearest support level is 1,300 – 1,310 points.

According to Vietcombank Securities Company (VCBS), the benchmark has recovered significantly from the short-term bottom of 1,250 points, even amid the uncertainties of the international financial market and complicated developments of the fourth COVID-19 outbreak in Việt Nam. 

“The index will continue to move in a range of 1,300 – 1,350 points in the next few weeks. And the closest resistance level in the near future is 1,350 points,” VCBS said. 

The securities firm recommends short-term investors can consider taking profits of some stocks that have achieved expected profits, and at the same time switch to holding mid-cap stocks that not yet jumped strongly in the previous period.

Meanwhile, long-term investors can take advantage of the corrections to continue to accumulate target stocks with positive growth outlooks and healthy financial foundations in 2021.

Taking a more optimistic view, Bank for Investment & Development of Vietnam Securities Company said that the correction of last week will not affect the market’s rally trend to 1,350 – 1,380 points this week. 

Last week, the market’s recovery helped all stock groups gain points. 

Data compiled by Saigon – Hanoi Securities JSC (SHS) showed that real estate stocks rose strongly with pillar stocks such as Novaland (VNL), Vinhomes JSC (VHM) and Vingroup JSC (VIC) up more than 3 per cent. 

Stocks of securities companies, aviation stocks and information technology stocks also recorded big gains in a range of 0.9 – 9.2 per cent.

By Vietnam News

Related

Source: Vietnam Insider

In Mongolia, hospitals are overwhelmed. In the tiny archipelago of Seychelles, more than 100 new Covid-19 cases are being reported each day. And in Chile, a nationwide lockdown was lifted this week — but the country is still reporting thousands of daily cases.

What links these countries is that they have each fully inoculated more than 50% of their populations, largely with Chinese-made coronavirus vaccines. And that’s raised questions over the vaccines’ efficacy.

If the Chinese vaccines aren’t working, that’s a huge problem — and not just from a health perspective. Beijing has staked its reputation on providing other countries with vaccines.

As Western nations stockpiled supplies for their own populations, China sent vaccines overseas — in June, the foreign ministry announced the country had delivered more than 350 million Covid-19 doses to more than 80 countries. That mission highlighted inadequate Western efforts at a time when tensions between China and many major democracies were running high.

Questions over the efficacy of China’s Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines now jeopardize that soft-power win for Beijing, although China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin has dismissed such criticism as a “bias-motivated … smear.”

Experts say that while these Chinese vaccines might not be as effective as some, they aren’t a failure. No vaccine gives 100% protection against Covid-19, so breakthrough cases are to be expected.

The crucial metric for measuring success, they say, is preventing deaths and hospitalizations, not aiming for zero Covid-19.

Why are vaccinated people getting sick?

China has two vaccines authorized for emergency use by the World Health Organization (WHO), Sinopharm and Sinovac. Both use inactivated viruses to prompt an immune response in the patient, a tried and tested vaccine method.

Pfizer and Moderna, by contrast, use a newer technology called mRNA, which teaches the body’s cells how to make a piece of the coronavirus spike protein that triggers an immune response.

“If we want to bring down the severe cases (and) the number of deaths, the Sinopharm, Sinovac can help.”Professor Jin Dong-yan,
Virologist, Hong Kong University

So far, trials show Sinopharm and Sinovac have a lower efficacy against Covid-19 than their mRNA counterparts. In Brazilian trials, Sinovac had about 50% efficacy against symptomatic Covid-19, and 100% effectiveness against severe disease, according to trial data submitted to the WHO. Sinopharm’s efficacy for both symptomatic and hospitalized disease was estimated at 79%, according to the WHO.

Both Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 are more than 90% effective against symptomatic Covid-19. Global efficacy studies of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine showed it was 66% effective against moderate to severe illness, 85% effective against severe disease and 100% effective at preventing death. The trials took place at different times, and in places where different variants were circulating.

Experts say the outbreaks in places that used Chinese vaccines are broadly in line with what we would expect from these efficacy rates.

“If we want to bring down the severe cases (and) the number of deaths, the Sinopharm, Sinovac can help,” said Jin Dong-yan, a professor in molecular virology at Hong Kong University.

Ben Cowling, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the same university, said the Chinese vaccines appeared to be limiting the number of serious infections and deaths.

“I think the vaccines are certainly working and they’re certainly saving a lot of lives,” he said.

What’s going on in Chile, Mongolia and Seychelles?

Chile is reporting thousands of new Covid-19 cases each day. There, 55% of the population is fully vaccinated, and among that cohort almost 80% received Sinovac.

But according to the Ministry of Health, 73% of cases in the intensive care unit between June 17 and 23 were not fully vaccinated.

It’s a similar situation in the Seychelles, where authorities said almost all critical and severe cases of Covid-19 were in people who had not been fully vaccinated. The country is using Sinopharm in adults under 60, while over 60s get Covishield, the AstraZeneca vaccine made in India, which has a similar efficacy rate of 76% against symptomatic Covid-19 and 100% efficacy against severe or critical Covid-19.

The Seychelles Ministry of Health said in a Facebook post last month that of the 63 people who had died from Covid-19 in the country at the time, three had been vaccinated with two doses. All three were aged between 51 and 80. CNN has reached out to the Ministry of Health for comment.

Mongolia has fully vaccinated 53% of its population, with 80% of those people receiving Sinopharm, according to Enkhsaihan Lkhagvasuren, the Ministry of Health’s head of public health policy implementation. A fifth of Mongolia’s Covid-19 cases have been fully vaccinated, but 96% of Covid-19 deaths were in people who were either unvaccinated or had received just one dose, Lkhagvasuren said.

To reach herd immunity, Lkhagvasuren said more than 80% of the population needed to be inoculated. The country of 3 million still has 1.6 million people vulnerable to Covid-19, she said.

“We cannot differentiate between Covid-19 vaccines, saying this one is bad or that one is good.”Enkhsaihan Lkhagvasuren,
Mongolian Ministry of Health

And she maintained that Sinopharm had been very effective.

“We cannot differentiate between Covid-19 vaccines, saying this one is bad or that one is good. All of the available vaccines reduce the risk of severe illness,” she said.

Odgerel Chuluunbat, a fully vaccinated business owner in Mongolia’s capital Ulaanbaatar who tested positive for Covid-19 two weeks ago and recovered at home, said she believed her infection could have been much worse without the Sinopharm vaccine.

“I don’t regret getting the jab,” she said. “Without it, the situation in the country would be very bad.”

With global vaccines in short supply, many developing countries had few other options. Mongolia was allocated more than 112,000 AstraZeneca doses and 126,000 Pfizer doses via COVAX, but production issues and India’s outbreak have delayed deliveries.

Why are vaccinated people dying?

Some people who are getting vaccinated with Sinovac or Sinopharm are still dying of Covid — although these breakthrough cases are possible with any vaccine.

In Indonesia, which the Red Cross warned this week is “on the edge of catastrophe,” at least 88 doctors died of Covid-19 between February and June 26. At least 20 were fully vaccinated with Sinovac, according to Dr. Adib Khumaidi, the chief of Indonesian Medical Association’s risk mitigation team. Another 35 had not been vaccinated, and 33 deaths are still under investigation.

An estimated 1,600 doctors in Indonesia have been infected with Covid-19 in May and June alone, although it’s unclear how many of those had been vaccinated.

Adib said most medical workers died because they were in a unique circumstance: they were overwhelmed with patients, meaning they had to work long hours with little rest.

“Based on our investigation data, the death of medical workers has nothing to do with the Sinovac vaccine,” Adib said. “The most important thing is taking the Covid vaccine and people should keep following health protocols.”

Dr. Hermawan Saputra, an epidemiologist and member of the Indonesian Public Health Experts Association, said more virulent strains of Covid-19 may have reduced the efficacy of the vaccines.

The issue of inoculated people dying from Covid-19 is not contained to Chinese vaccines. A Public Health England report in June found that of the 117 people who died within 28 days of testing positive for the Delta variant in the UK, 50 had received two doses. But such deaths are rare — in total, there were 92,029 Delta cases, of which 58% were unvaccinated. The UK is using Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, which are both mRNA vaccines, and Oxford/AstraZeneca, which uses a different technology.

In an article in the Guardian, statisticians David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters said some deaths were to be expected from good, but not perfect, vaccines.

Virologist Jin cautioned there could be underlying issues in these serious cases. Some vaccinated people hospitalized with Covid-19 might be immunocompromized, meaning their body is not able to produce a strong immune response, he said.

Have the Chinese vaccines failed?

Pfizer and Moderna vaccines appear to be more effective than Sinovac and Sinopharm at limiting transmission, but whether the two WHO-approved Chinese vaccines have failed depends on the metrics for success.

Jin said the Chinese vaccines’ efficacy might not be high enough to stop the virus circulating in a community, thereby putting herd immunity out of reach. That runs the risk of vaccine-resistant variants emerging.

“It’s possible that the end of the pandemic might be delayed, or we might have to work with these flu-like diseases for a longer period of time,” Jin said. “(The Sinovac, Sinopharm vaccines) are good, but they’re just not good enough. We want the vaccine to help put an end to the pandemic, and if that is the case, Pfizer and Moderna are doing a much better job.”

He said the manufacturers of the Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines have a responsibility to improve, which could just be a matter of increasing the dose or adding a third dose.

There are also signs China might not rely entirely on homegrown vaccines in the future. China’s Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical said in a Hong Kong Stock Exchange filing that it would work with BioNTech to produce up to 1 billion vaccines annually.

Pfizer and Moderna may roll out in more countries next year after manufacturing capacity is increased. But right now, there’s just not enough to go around.

Even so, getting a Chinese vaccine is still better than nothing, said Scott Rosenstein, director of the global health program at Eurasia Group.

“In places where that’s the only option, it still remains the best decision to take it,” he said.

And he worries that criticism of the Chinese vaccines may encourage people to wait until more effective vaccines become available.

“That itself creates challenges for the rollout, it means that you vaccinate people slower,” he said.

How does politics play into this?

As it exports vaccines around the world, Beijing has promoted the Sinopharm and Sinovac shots as “Chinese vaccines,” aligning the products with China’s government in a way not seen in the US or the UK.

After the WHO validated Sinovac and more efficacy data on Sinopharm was released in June, for example, state media Xinhua ran an editorial under the headline: “Latest evidence reaffirms Chinese vaccines’ benefits to the world.”

When the vaccines are a success, that reflects well on the Chinese Communist Party, even though Sinovac is a privately owned company (Sinopharm is state-owned). But because China’s shots are often flattened to “Chinese vaccines,” when there are questions over efficacy, that impacts all of them — and hurts the party, too.

Neither vaccine company has made extensive trial data public, which may allow efficacy questions to continue.

“The most I can say about that data is that those vaccines seem to work OK,” Rosenstein said. “You’re sort of partially flying blind here because the gold standard is a randomized trial, and we don’t have that much to work with for those.”

“If given the option to get inoculated again with Sinopharm or any other vaccine, I will refuse it.”Gandi Boldbaatar,
Mongolian student

The lack of data has fed skepticism. Now reports of cases even among vaccinated people is prompting a backlash. In Mongolia, where there’s already a long-running anti-China sentiment, partly thanks to a belief that neighboring China wants to undermine its sovereignty, many are frustrated about the rate of infections.

Gandi Boldbaatar, a 22-year-old student, said she was fully vaccinated with Sinopharm a month ago, but tested positive for Covid-19 last week and is now in intensive care in a government hospital. She said she didn’t think Mongolia’s vaccination campaign was very effective.

“I still got very sick,” she said. “If given the option to get inoculated again with Sinopharm or any other vaccine, I will refuse it.”

Some of the backlash is wrapped up in “political scorekeeping” over the vaccines, said Rosenstein. When China’s efforts started, Western countries were accused of hoarding vaccines. Questions over Chinese vaccine efficacy have come about as the US announced its own plans to donate millions of vaccines abroad.

“It’s too early to say that the verdict is in,” Rosenstein said. “The downside (of vaccine diplomacy) may have outweighed the upside … I think that the vaccine diplomacy objectives of China at this point are not being realized.”

But the bigger picture, Rosenstein said, isn’t about politics — it’s about health.

“It’s bad for public health when you have so much political jockeying instead of good faith discussions around what’s the best way to get this outbreak under control.”

@ CNN. Julia Hollingsworth wrote and reported from Hong Kong, with reporting from Saruul Enkhbold in Ulaanbaatar, Amy Sood and Sophie Jeong in Hong Kong, Yong Xiong in Seoul, Angus Watson in Sydney, David Culver in Beijing and Cristopher Ulloa in Santiago.

Vietnam begs public for ‘vaccine fund’ donations after virus surge

Vietnam, once a model for its successful handling of the pandemic, has started asking for public donations to buy vaccines as it struggles to contain a new coronavirus wave.

The Southeast Asian country has vaccinated only about one percent of its population of nearly 100 million, and authorities have become increasingly alarmed by a recent spike in cases.

Since last week, mobile phone users have received up to three text messages urging them to contribute to a Covid-19 vaccine fund, while civil servants have been encouraged to part with a day’s pay.

Some residents, fearful of the virus’ impact on Vietnam’s economy — one of the few in the world to expand last year — told AFP they support the fundraising drive.

Nguyen Tuan Anh, a civil servant, told AFP he had sent around $50 via bank transfer and SMS payment, as vaccines would mean “Vietnam’s economy will be stable and develop again”.

Vietnam’s industrial northern provinces — home to key factories such as Samsung and Foxconn — have been particularly badly hit by the latest outbreak.

Across the country, tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs, according to state media, with bars and restaurants forced to close in major hubs such as Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City and public gatherings cancelled.

Cases have more than tripled since April to reach almost 9,000. Although the number is low in comparison to most of its Southeast Asian neighbours, Vietnam’s vaccination rate per capita is the lowest in the region, and among the lowest in Asia, according to an AFP tally.

The communist government has said it aims to secure 150 million vaccine doses this year to cover 70 percent of its population — at a cost of $1.1 billion.

#photo1

But only $630 million has been allocated to vaccine procurement in the budget.

A financial “contribution from the community and society” is needed to make a mass roll-out possible, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh told the nation on Saturday during a live broadcast to launch the campaign.

By Tuesday, more than 231,000 individuals and organisations had donated $181 million to the campaign.

Another $140 million has been promised by businesses, the Ministry of Finance said.

However, the campaign has been shunned by some who are concerned with how the money will be spent.

“I am not sure if the donated money will be used for the sole purpose of buying vaccines to inoculate every citizen…I don’t think I have enough trust to give them my money,” said office worker Pham Mai Chi.

@ AFP

Tax filings reveal Biden cancer charity spent millions on salaries, zero on research.

The Biden Cancer Initiative was founded in 2017 by the former vice president and his wife Jill Biden to “develop and drive implementation of solutions to accelerate progress in cancer prevention, detection, diagnosis, research and care and to reduce disparities in cancer outcomes,” according to its IRS mission statement. But it gave out no grants in its first two years, and spent millions on the salaries of former Washington DC aides it hired.

The charity took in $4,809,619 in contributions in fiscal years 2017 and 2018, and spent $3,070,301 on payroll in those two years. The group’s president, Gregory Simon, raked in $429,850 in fiscal 2018 (July 1, 2018 to June 30, 2019), according to the charity’s most recent federal tax filings.

Simon, a former Pfizer executive and longtime health care lobbyist who headed up the White House’s cancer task force in the Obama administration, saw his salary nearly double from the $224,539 he made in fiscal 2017, tax filings show.

Danielle Carnival, former chief of staff for Obama’s cancer initiative, the Cancer Moonshot Task Force, who took home $258,207 in 2018.

The charity spent $56,738 on conferences and $59,356 on travel that year. The following year, the travel expenditure swelled to $97,149, and the non-profit spent $742,953 on conferences, tax filings show.

Greg Simon, former executive director of the White House cancer task force The Washington Post via Getty Images

But under grants distributed, it listed zero.

Simon had said that the main point of the charity was not to give out grants, and that its goal was to find ways to accelerate treatment for all, regardless of their economic or cultural backgrounds.

Biden headed up the Cancer Moonshot Task Force when he was veep after his son Beau died of a brain tumor in 2015. After leaving office, the Biden Cancer Initiative sought to continue such efforts to provide “urgent” solutions to treating cancer, according to a 2017 press statement announcing its launch.

The Bidens stacked the board with leading oncologists and celebrity cancer survivors, including musician Jimmy Gomez from the Black Eyed Peas.

After only two years, the charity “paused” its operations when Biden and his wife stepped down for Joe Biden’s presidential run.

Although the organization is still officially active, according to the IRS, Simon said in a 2019 interview that without the Bidens at the helm, the charity lost its edge.

“We tried to power through but it became increasingly difficult to get the traction we needed to complete our mission,” he told the AP in July 2019.

Neither Simon nor Biden could be reached for comment last week.

By Isabel Vincent

Source: https://nypost.com/2020/11/14/biden-cancer-initiative-spent-millions-on-payroll-zero-on-research-report/

Around the world, people who accidentally spread the coronavirus must face both a dangerous illness and an onslaught of online condemnation.

On February 18th, Nga Nguyen, an Instagram influencer who likes travel and couture, flew from London—her “base”—to Milan, where she attended Gucci’s spring show. The fashion house picked up the bill for the flight and the hotel. Nga, who is twenty-eight, explained to me, “I have a very good relationship with all the brands, whether as a long-term client or just as a friend.” She was joined in Milan by her sister, Nhung, who is a year younger and lives in Hanoi, where she manages a luxury hotel that their family owns. A week after the Gucci event, the sisters took the Eurostar to Paris, for the Saint Laurent show; they then went to London, where they stayed at Nga’s house. On March 1st, Nhung flew back to Vietnam and Nga made a short business trip to Germany, where she also took a relative to a doctor’s appointment. In the examination room, Nga coughed slightly. “The doctor looked up and suggested a coronavirus test,” she recalled. “I thought he was joking.”

The doctor swabbed a mucus sample from Nga’s nose, and told her to go to the relative’s house and wait. She remembers feeling fine, but that evening she developed a fever, and her cough worsened. Two days later, she had pneumonia, and her coronavirus test was positive. A runner who can normally cover four miles in half an hour, she could barely walk. On March 12th, emergency workers took Nga to the hospital. She remained there for more than a week, then returned to her relative’s house, where she eventually made a full recovery. Now back in London, she feels “very grateful for the care” that she received in Germany.

When Nhung arrived in Hanoi, she passed through an airport checkpoint, and had no fever. But she began coughing that night. Four days later, she became Hanoi’s first confirmed Covid-19 patient. She spent two weeks in isolation at the National Hospital for Tropical Diseases, then went home to quarantine. She, too, has recovered and is thankful to the doctors who treated her.

The sisters’ experience differed in one crucial way. European Union nations have strong privacy protections, and no one besides Nga’s family and a few friends knew that she had Covid-19. Nhung’s case became public knowledge. Before she received her diagnosis, Vietnam had a small number of coronavirus cases outside the capital, and the outbreak had dwindled to nothing. A Vietnamese journalist told me, “The government was thinking of declaring Vietnam free of an epidemic.” Nhung spoiled the plan. The authorities, determined to make other Hanoi residents stay home, especially in Nhung’s neighborhood, made a show of locking down her street. That wasn’t all: the Vietnamese government, which regularly uses newspaper leaks to persuade or frighten its citizens, invited the press to watch a live stream of a meeting about the young woman’s medical condition. Within an hour of articles about the meeting being published, people on the Internet had figured out who Nhung was and found her social-media accounts.

In less than a day, Nhung’s Instagram account had ten thousand new followers—and many of them were attacking her. Things got so out of control that she changed her account setting to private. Although she was lying in a hospital bed, people kept claiming to see her bustling about the city. One user came across a photograph of a woman who looked like Nhung at the grand opening of a Uniqlo, and reposted the image on Instagram, announcing to her followers that Nhung was partying while sick. Another user posted a picture of a different look-alike walking along Ta Hien, Hanoi’s night-life strip, and suggested that Nhung was casually infecting passersby. Next came a rumor that Nhung had gone to visit her boyfriend in Vinhomes Times City, an upscale district.

The Vietnamese government, clearly committed to making an example of Nhung, let it be known that when she flew home from London she did not mention her visit to Italy. Not only had Nhung apparently infected her sister; according to officials, she was the probable source of infection of ten other people on the flight, all of whom tested positive shortly afterward, as well as the driver who picked her up from the airport, her housekeeper, and one of her aunts. Some of the infected airplane passengers were British tourists, leading the Daily Mail to proclaim that Nhung was a “super-spreader.” The Vietnamese government posted photographs of Nhung in her hospital room—ostensibly to prove that she was recovering—and social-media users marshalled these images to lambaste her yet again.

The wave of anger also reached Nga in Europe. She was pictured in articles about the fashion industry and the spread of Covid-19. It made no difference that she appeared not to have infected anyone. “The people I interacted with during Fashion Week were all fine,” she told me. “My photographer and my makeup artist were in close proximity, and they were O.K.” Nevertheless, enraged Vietnamese mined Nga’s Instagram account, including recent photographs from her trip to Milan and Paris, to portray her as heedless and decadent. Trolls dug up an old image of Nga on vacation in Mykonos, dressed in Saint Laurent and standing beside Salt Bae—the Turkish celebrity chef known for the extravagant way he sprinkles salt while cooking. Someone in Vietnam dotted the Mykonos image with bright crown shapes, to suggest that Nga was dispensing the coronavirus like salt. Instagram users gave the image almost eleven thousand likes. One Vietnamese commenter said of Nga, “She has the collective consciousness of a cunt.” Another declared, “Please help me send a fuck you to . . . Nhung’s whole family.”

The source of Nga’s prominence—her glossy Instagram account—became a cudgel to beat her and her sister with. One social-media user tried to pit the Nguyens against each other. “I’ve followed you for a long time because you’re talented,” a woman from the city of Ha Long wrote to Nga. “But I really cannot accept your sister.” She added, “I hope you and your family will recover quickly.”

The attacks hurt the sisters when they were at their most vulnerable. Nhung secluded herself and turned to meditation. Nga told me, “Battling the virus while all these articles are slapping at you makes it harder.” She saw the attacks as examples of class jealousy: “In Vietnam, we are too privileged—we travel too much.” She ascribed the extraordinary attention she and her sister received elsewhere to racism, noting, “If this was Paris Hilton, there would not be so much fuss.”

Public shaming used to take place in the public square. By the nineteenth century, it had moved to the newspaper, and in the twentieth century the forum was television. Today, people are scorned online. The Internet, with its opportunity for anonymity, its absence of gatekeepers, and its magnification of transient hurts, has made it unnervingly easy to generate instant mass outrage. The blog, a venue of self-reflection, has given way to the social-media post, which tends to favor the impulsive attack and the group pile-on.

Digital shaming delivers swift and overwhelming retribution, often unfairly. You don’t even have to be in the right to successfully pillory someone: all you need is to feel that you have been wronged. In 2015, an Australian man at a shopping center took a selfie in front of a poster of Darth Vader and sent it to his kids. A mother standing nearby, mistakenly thinking that the camera was pointed at her children, decided that the man was a predator. She photographed him and posted the image on Facebook, warning, “Take a look at this creep!” The post was shared twenty thousand times. When the man’s partner told him that people online were calling him a pedophile, he drove to the local police station to clear his name. It was too late: he had already been identified on the Internet. He received death threats. After his accuser’s error was revealed, so did she.

Earlier this year, when Singapore was in lockdown, a local woman was caught on video refusing to wear a mask while ordering at a food stall. The clip went viral, and online commenters misidentified her as Tuhina Singh, the chief executive of a tech company. An online mob doxed Singh—posting her e-mail address and telephone number. She was subjected to attacks until Singapore authorities revealed that the actual culprit was named Paramjeet Kaur. Social-media users then pounced on Kaur, calling her a “Covidiot.”

Digital shaming has its defenders. When wrongdoers are socially powerful, registering frustration with them on such forums as Twitter can seem more like collective resistance than like bullying. The #MeToo movement, for example, has exposed many celebrities, politicians, and executives who have engaged in inappropriate behavior. A similar logic has guided the filming of police violence that gave rise to Black Lives Matter. Jennifer Jacquet, a professor at New York University, has argued that digital shaming can succeed when other forms of political action fail: a viral video of environmental destruction can become a worldwide scandal that forces a corporation to adopt greener policies. In a 2015 book, “Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool,” Jacquet notes that the mere possibility of public censure is often sufficient to keep people in line: “At its most efficient, a sense of shame can regulate personal behavior and reduce the risk of more extreme types of punishment.” She recently told MSNBC that the Covid-19 pandemic is opening up “a lot of opportunity with shaming”—though she cautioned that people should condemn “a broad sweeping behavior,” such as gathering in large groups indoors, rather than harass “a particular individual.”

Online shaming may not be as brutal as the Puritan stocks, but it can be devastating in its scale: a target of ire who is trending on Twitter might receive hundreds of humiliating messages per second. Sometimes digital campaigns go too far even for those who unleash them. This past spring, a New Yorker named Christian Cooper went bird-watching in Central Park, and asked a woman to put her dog on a leash. When she refused, he began filming her, and she responded by calling the cops and telling them pointedly that “an African-American man” was “threatening” her. His sister posted the video on Twitter. “She needs a good public shaming,” one user said. “Do your thing Twitter.” Millions of people watched the clip, and the woman—a business executive named Amy Cooper—became so notorious that the investment firm where she worked fired her. Amy Cooper’s behavior was appalling, but Christian Cooper seemed a little shaken by the backlash against her, telling the Times, “I’m not excusing the racism, but I don’t know if her life needed to be torn apart.”

Lawrence Garbuz is a fifty-one-year-old trusts-and-estates lawyer. He lives in New Rochelle, in Westchester County, and works at a firm, in midtown Manhattan, that he co-founded with his wife, Adina Lewis. They have four children, including one at Yeshiva University and another at a high school in the Bronx.

One day in February, Garbuz developed a cough and a fever. At the time, nearly all Americans known to have Covid-19 had gone abroad or been in contact with others who had. Garbuz had hardly travelled recently, and he sat at his desk all day, so he wasn’t worried about being infected.

Yet he continued to feel worse, and, after his doctor suggested that he go to the hospital, a friend drove him to one in Bronxville. An X-ray appeared to show ordinary pneumonia, so no special measures were taken to isolate him when he was admitted. Garbuz is an active member of a synagogue in New Rochelle, and part of Jewish tradition is to visit the sick. As many as a dozen friends and family members went to see him. After four days, he was having such difficulty breathing that he was intubated and transferred to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital—again without special precautions. There, on March 2nd, he was given a Covid-19 diagnosis and placed in a medical coma, so that he could be on a ventilator without discomfort. Three weeks later, Garbuz was out of danger. By then, more than twenty-three thousand people in New York State had tested positive for the coronavirus.

Before Garbuz went to the Bronxville hospital, he had attended a funeral and a b’nai mitzvah—unknowingly exposing more than a hundred families. Unfortunately, he appears to have been an efficient spreader of the virus: his wife, his two children who lived at home, his friend who drove him to the hospital, and a nurse who treated him soon tested positive for the virus. In all, Garbuz was at the center of an outbreak of ninety infections.

His diagnosis was reported at a time when America was still hoping to avoid the devastation that had occurred in China and Italy. On March 3rd, New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, tweeted the name of Garbuz’s law firm—Lewis and Garbuz—and mentioned where his children attended school. The Mayor’s intention was to alert anyone who might have come into contact with the family, but the effect was to violate a patient’s privacy. A surprised commenter asked on Twitter, “Can you really spill this much info about a person if they test positive?”

Adina Lewis had long used social media to chronicle the turns of her personal life. After de Blasio’s tweet, she wrote on Facebook, “I ask all of us who are running on the hamster wheel of life, particularly us New Yorkers, to learn from this and take a moment to take care of yourself.” Most Facebook users who commented on her post wished her husband a quick recovery. A woman named Nora Madonick said, “That anyone would consider this anything other than a terribly unfortunate situation with no possible blame is unthinkable.” Others were lacerating. A young man whom the Garbuzes had never met posted, “I hope your business never rebounds for what your husband has brought upon us.” The hostility directed at the family spread beyond the digital realm. A New Rochelle laundry refused to wash the family’s clothes, and for more than a week their mail stopped being delivered; only after Lewis complained to the town’s mayor did it resume.

On Purim, Lewis returned to Facebook to wish others a happy holiday, and commented that she was trying to see the “blessing” in “this cluster of virus.” Perhaps her husband was “a messenger of something good,” and “his illness was able to make us all aware of the problem.” She reminded people that her husband hadn’t had any known risk factors. “Let’s all stay rational and calm,” she urged. “Let’s continue to find the humor in the absurdity of it all. I look forward to being able to laugh about the time we were all ‘coronaed’ (a verb I just made up) with all of you.”

The post elicited more than four hundred comments—many of them scathing. A resident of Rye wrote, “A blessing?,” and went on, “He did not go to one party he went to three. He continued to travel on metro north. He was coughing. His hands were filled with germs. Anyone he touched got sick. . . . It was thoughtless and reckless.” A man from Queens wrote, “He kept going to the synagogue where the rabbi and other congregants tested positive who then spread it to hundreds of people and now New York has over 20,000 cases and 157 people are dead in the city and people can’t pay their rent. Don’t call this a blessing.” Another commenter said, “I did have a family member pass due to Covid-19. I will not hail your husband as a hero!” Then there was the young man who had told Lewis that he hoped her husband’s career would not recover. “He deserves to die,” he wrote. “He’s a scumbag. Endangered hundreds of thousands of people. He will never be able to live in New York again after this and he deserves it.”

People with contagious diseases have often been targets of shaming. In 1907, Mary Mallon, a cook for wealthy families in New York, was confirmed as the first healthy carrier of typhoid bacteria. She had inadvertently infected seven of the eight families she worked for. Mallon was ordered into quarantine but did not accept responsibility: how could she infect others if she wasn’t sick? She was released from quarantine after agreeing not to work as a cook again. But she changed her name and began cooking for a new household, causing more infections. Forcibly returned to quarantine, she was denounced in newspapers and given a memorable nickname: Typhoid Mary. One article featured an illustration of a woman frying skulls in a skillet. In a letter that Mallon wrote in 1909, she lamented that she had become “a peep show for everybody.”

During the flu epidemic of 1918, the U.S. was at war, and many officials used the language of patriotism to encourage compliance with policies that staved off infection. In San Francisco, masks became mandatory, and that October a hundred residents of the city were arrested for violating the rule. (Most pleaded forgetfulness.) The Chronicle published a list naming many of the offenders, explaining, “The man or woman or child who will not wear a mask now is a dangerous slacker.”

Shaming has been part of each subsequent epidemic, from AIDS to SARS, but nothing prepared the world for the ubiquity of it during the Covid-19 crisis. At a time when ordinary social life has nearly been eliminated, social-media use is soaring, and ordinary acts can be dangerous, almost every day is punctuated with multiple waves of online outrage. People have been shamed for stockpiling toilet paper and paper towels, for going to stores to buy groceries, and for having them delivered. They have been shamed for not wearing a mask, or for wearing medical-grade masks on the street. They have been shamed for paying too much attention to their health, and for not being mindful enough. In the U.K., the police have deployed drone footage to embarrass dog walkers for using their pets as a pretext for engaging in nonessential activities. In Florida, a man dressed as the Grim Reaper, who has reminded people on beaches to keep their distance, has received death threats online.

Digital shaming seems to become particularly virulent when there is no agreement on what constitutes correct behavior. Many Covid-19 statutes are vague; the epidemiology behind the disease is in flux. How close is too close for sunbathing beachgoers? Are neck gaiters worthless at containing your droplets, or just as effective as traditional masks? Meanwhile, the U.S. is being led by a President who derives part of his political power from belittling expertise. To the consternation of liberals, he has resisted wearing a mask, and his disdain has been mirrored by many of his followers, who condemn mask-wearers as “sheeple.”

When two brothers from Tennessee amassed nearly eighteen thousand bottles of hand sanitizer to resell on the Internet, social-media users devoured them. “I hope that man from Tennessee overdoses on sanitizer for being such a useless, repulsive piece of shit,” a woman from New Jersey tweeted. Abashed, the brothers agreed to donate the goods instead. One of them issued a public apology, saying, “If by my actions anyone was directly impacted and unable to get sanitizer from one of their local stores because I purchased it all I am truly sorry.” He then told the Times, “That’s not who I am as a person. And all I’ve been told for the last 48 hours is how much of that person I am.” The Augusta Chronicle, declaring justice well served, said, “The vast court of public opinion is superbly suited to shame morally ambiguous opportunists.”

Even though the public has treated superspreaders as if they had intended to transmit the disease to others, incidents in which someone has deliberately spread Covid-19 to unsuspecting people have been virtually nonexistent. In March, ABC News reported that the F.B.I. had advised local law enforcement that far-right groups were planning to give the virus to their enemies, by sending infected supporters to Jewish services and spraying police officers with infected fluid. No such acts have occurred.

When the pandemic began, Wojciech Rokita, a gynecologist and obstetrician in Kielce, Poland, was also serving as a governmental health consultant for the region surrounding the city. Under his direction, the area’s neonatal mortality rate had gone from the worst in the nation to the best. In 2018, when he was fifty-two, his peers elected him the head of the Polish Society of Gynecologists and Obstetricians. Rokita, a prideful perfectionist, was known for upbraiding subordinates who made mistakes.

On March 8th, before Poland had any known cases of Covid-19, Rokita and his wife joined another couple on a skiing vacation in the Swiss Alps. At the ski resort, Rokita, who had helped establish guidelines for handling infected obstetric patients in the event of a coronavirus outbreak in Poland, frequently checked the news to monitor the infection’s spread in Europe. Concerned that an outbreak in Switzerland was becoming acute, he drove his party home earlier than expected, returning to Kielce on March 11th. While they were away, Poland had reported its first case of Covid-19. Three days after he got home, the country shut its borders.

Because Rokita’s job involved contact with patients, he got tested. The results took thirty hours to come back. In the meantime, he ran a few errands, including picking up his wife’s car from a BMW repair shop. Later that day, he was informed that he was positive. He began quarantining at the hospital where he worked, and spoke to the regional office of the state health agency, giving it names of people with whom he had been in contact.

Echo Dnia, a tabloid, soon learned that the first patient in the region to test positive was a local doctor. The paper posted the news online, and within thirty minutes Rokita had been named in the comments section. One of the employees at the BMW dealership claimed that Rokita had not kept a safe distance from workers. The tabloid didn’t mention that he had not received his test results at the time. Some nurses at Rokita’s hospital told the paper that he had also dropped by his workplace, violating sanitary measures. Outraged comments proliferated, including from people who knew him personally. “I’m certainly not going to let this go just because—thank God—I didn’t go to my appointment,” a hospital worker who was also a private patient of Rokita’s wrote, anonymously. “He could have consciously and deliberately infected me.” She added, “I wonder how many women weren’t as lucky as I was last week.” Video surveillance showed no sign of Rokita’s having been at the hospital before he started quarantining there. (The paper deleted the hospital worker’s comments—eventually.)

A commenter on the Echo Dnia Web site said of Rokita, “Someone should spit in his face.” Another wrote, “If he went skiing during the epidemic, and he’s really a doctor, then I think he’s a brainless moron.” Rokita’s cell phone was so overwhelmed by vitriolic calls that his family couldn’t get through to him. They began to worry that someone would burn down their house.

On March 14th, Rokita, voluntarily confined inside the hospital, called Echo Dnia and begged for the harassment to stop. The editor told Rokita that limiting comments about him on the paper’s Facebook page would only anger people more. According to his daughter Karolina, the editor tried to persuade Rokita to speak to one of the tabloid’s reporters, so that his reputation could be restored; her father said that he would consider it. Two days later, the press reported seven hundred and thirty-four new suspected infections in Poland. Everyone was worried, and some people sensed a conspiracy. The next day, someone wrote on Echo Dnia’s Facebook page, “Enough of this fucking collusion and sweeping things under the rug!”

Rokita tried to assure his family that the drama would soon blow over, but privately he was in agony. Karolina told me, “He was overwhelmed. Not only with the amount of hate comments, messages, phone calls he was receiving—even at 4 a.m.—but also with the fact that the attack came from people he knew and had helped in the past.” Rokita was touched when an old friend texted him with a simple message: “How are you feeling?” Rokita wrote back, “I’m still alive.”

That day, he FaceTimed Karolina from the hospital. She asked him if he was as sad as he looked. “I’m just tired,” he said. “Very tired.” That evening, his wife called his cell phone, but he didn’t pick up. The next day, Echo Dnia reported that Rokita had killed himself. The newspaper got this information before the family did. An online commenter soon revealed that Rokita had died by hanging.

Karolina thinks that her father’s act was intended to end the witch hunt against their family. She told me, “The same way we were scared for him, he was scared for us.”

Eventually, even the fiercest shaming campaign dies down. Public interest fades, and painful tweets disappear from everybody’s screens. Who still remembers such scandals as #PlaneBreakup or #CecilTheLion? Lawrence Garbuz was discharged from the hospital at the end of March. Since then, he has been at home, healing. When I called him, in July, he politely declined to talk about his experience. “I haven’t Googled my name,” he said. “Probably I don’t want to.” When I reached Nga Nguyen in London, she told me that she is willing to return to fashion shows when they resume, but added, “It’s not my priority.” She has been developing an environmentally responsible line of self-care products, and hopes “to launch by end of year.” She told me that her sister had been “more traumatized,” though Nhung’s infamy is also fading. The Vietnamese journalist I spoke with said of Nhung, “People don’t really care who she is anymore. There’s a kind of rule that, after twenty or thirty days, people should shift their attention.”

The Rokita family’s pain has continued. According to Karolina, no funeral home would take her father’s body. He was cremated, but hospital officials insisted that his family go to a location outside the city limits to take possession of his ashes, as if he had been a medieval leper. (A well-connected doctor persuaded the hospital to reconsider.) The Echo Dnia editor told me that he is sorry about Rokita’s death, though he noted that there is no official explanation for the suicide, and said, “The editorial staff made every effort to minimize the impact of hate appearing in the comment sections.” Yet, even after Rokita died, online posters continued to excoriate him. Some called his suicide a foolish overreaction. Three weeks after Rokita’s death, the respected Warsaw broadsheet Gazeta Wyborcza published a sympathetic account of the family’s ordeal, but even that story was greeted with nasty online responses. One poster felt that Rokita shouldn’t have been bothered by all the online denunciations about him. “What interested him in the comments idiots were leaving?” another poster asked. “What a disaster!” This person speculated that Rokita must have had another reason for killing himself: “Maybe he took bribes and was afraid it would get out.”

Nobody in Switzerland is known to have caught the virus from Rokita. His wife and the couple who travelled with them remained healthy. Officials in Kielce cannot trace a coronavirus infection to him. His wife initially had a positive test, but she didn’t get sick, and a retest indicated that she was negative. Accordingly, Rokita’s own test sample is being reëvaluated. The results have been delayed for months and Karolina suspects a coverup, to hide official incompetence. She points out that her father’s Covid-19 test was the first performed in the region. Whereas Nhung and Garbuz almost certainly spread the disease, if unwittingly, Rokita evidently didn’t spread it to anyone. It’s possible that he never had Covid-19 at all.

On February 28th, Rijo Moncy, a twenty-six-year-old radiologist at a hospital in Italy, flew from Venice to Kochi, India, with his parents. (They were all born in India but have lived in Italy since Rijo was a child.) In Kochi, the Moncys, instead of self-quarantining, immediately went out to visit friends and relatives. Soon afterward, an uncle fell ill, followed by Rijo Moncy and nine other family members. Moncy’s ninety-three-year-old grandfather, with whom he shared a special bond, was among the infected.

After the family sought medical attention, their names were leaked to the Indian press. Trolls began attacking them online—with some calling for public floggings. The family were barraged with messages accusing them of deliberately bringing the virus from Italy. “The worst part wasn’t the virus,” Moncy told me. “It was the attacks on social networks.” K. K. Shailaja, the provincial health minister in Kerala, denounced the family as “irresponsible.” The Moncys took refuge in the Bible.

Moncy and his parents eventually went to a medical center in Pathanamthitta, and that’s when things turned around. The hospital gave them good care, and they were not stigmatized. Moncy told the Telegraph India, “They gave us a cake, food packets . . . and some rations which we never expected from a government hospital.” A nurse who treated others in the family caught the virus, but she didn’t get angry about it. “This is our job,” she said. Online, the trolls quieted down after Moncy apologized, in various media, for the family’s mistakes. “We thanked everyone,” he notes. “Even the people who had trolled us.”

Within a month, all the family members had emerged from the hospital, including Moncy’s grandfather—who, as the oldest person in India to recover from Covid-19, became a national hero. “He gave people courage,” Moncy explained to me. In an interview with a national magazine, he said of his grandfather, “Thank God he lives in Kerala. Had he been in Italy or the United States, he would have been left to die.”

Moncy has returned to Italy and gone back to work. He remains amazed that his shaming experience ended positively. Indians learned from his family’s misadventure and grew more tolerant. “There was so much ignorance before,” he told me. Shailaja, the health minister who had castigated them, contacted him after they were discharged. “She is a wonderful person, very smart,” Moncy said. “She called us at home, to see how we were.” The social-media attacks have ended. During the furor, Moncy told me, he had downloaded some of them onto his phone. “I have now erased them,” he added. “So I can try to forget.” 

By D. T. Max @ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/28/the-public-shaming-pandemic

The Singapore Airlines (SIA) group will be cutting around 2,400 positions across its airlines in Singapore and across its overseas stations.

The group has about 27,619 staff, according to figures released in its latest annual report.

“This decision was taken in light of the long road to recovery for the global airline industry due to the debilitating impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the urgent need for the group’s airlines to adapt to an uncertain future,” says SIA in a filing on September 10.

“Discussions have begun with our Singapore-based unions. The group will work closely with them to finalise the arrangements as soon as possible for those affected, and try to minimise the stress and anxiety on our people,” it adds.

The group previously indicated that it expects to operate at under 50% of its capacity at the end of FY20/21 compared to its pre-Covid levels.

The group’s airlines will also operate a smaller fleet for a reduced network compared to their pre-Covid operations in the coming years.

According to SIA, the group said it originally needed to cut some 4,300 positions. However, the numbers were previously mitigated by a recruitment freeze in March 2020, natural attrition, an early retirement scheme for ground staff and pilots, and a voluntary release scheme for cabin crew. The measures allowed the group to already eliminate some 1,900 positions.

International students and foreign family members of Vietnamese citizens are among those allowed to enter Vietnam on commercial flights to be resumed from Tuesday.

The government has allowed the Transport Ministry to reopen flights to mainland China, Japan and South Korea from September 15, followed by Laos, Cambodia from September 22, the Government Office said Tuesday evening.

The ministry had proposed that passengers allowed entry includes Vietnamese citizens, foreigners carrying diplomatic and official passports, experts, business managers, high-skilled workers, investors, and their family members.

The government’s permission has added international students and family members of Vietnamese citizens to the list of those allowed entry in the latest loosening of arrival restrictions.

The flights are not opened to tourists yet.

There will be a maximum of two round trips a week between the destinations opening up, and the number of flights will be adjusted depending on actual demand.

Passengers must have a certificate showing they tested negative for the novel coronavirus within three days of boarding the flight. That test must be conducted using the real-time reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) method.

Upon landing in Vietnam, the arrivals would be tested again with the RT-PRC method at centralized quarantine camps.

The quarantine period for those who test negative twice would be reduced from 14 to five days, following which they have to remain at their accommodation or place of work until the 14 days are up under supervision of local authorities. Those showing signs of infection will have to continue staying at the centralized quarantine facilities.

Those entering Vietnam after transiting from a third destination must stay in centralized quarantine camps for 14 days and undergo tests as required.

All arrivals will have to pay for their quarantine and tests.

Quarantine options

After taking necessary screening steps at quarantine camps, foreign arrivals have different options for continued quarantine.

Foreigners holding official or diplomatic passports and their families can be quarantined at their offices’ guest houses or at lodgings of their choice.

Experts, investors, business managers, high-skilled workers and their families, international students and foreign family members of Vietnamese citizens will be quarantined at their company offices, factories or lodgings.

Vietnamese arrivals will be quarantined at military camps or lodgings.

The Health Ministry had already announced that those entering Vietnam for a period of less than 14 days will not have to be quarantined at centralized camps, but they must ensure compliance with all other requirements, including wearing a mask and refraining from shaking hands. They also need to complete medical procedures, including tests for Covid-19 and the organization that invites them needs to guarantee that it, or an international insurance company, will bear all medical and other expenses if they contract the disease in Vietnam.

The government’s decision came not long after the Transport Ministry said earlier Tuesday that it is yet to allow resumption of flights pending final decisions on quarantine and testing procedures.

Vietnam has suspended all international flights since late March.

The country has recorded 1,063 Covid-19 cases so far with 35 deaths. No local transmission has been recorded for 12 days.

@ VN Express

Vietnam Airlines will operate one-way flights from Vietnam to Japan starting from September 18.

The national carrier says the flights are intended to “serve the increasing needs of passengers wishing to work, study and stay in Japan”.

The airline is operating four flights to Tokyo’s Narita Airport, but the carrier will not be flying any return flights.

Flights from Hanoi to Tokyo’s Narita Airport will depart at 11.45 pm on September 18, 25, and 30, and flights from Ho Chi Minh City to Narita will depart at 12 am on September 30. A B787 aircraft will be flown on all flights.

The airline says the its crew will undergo health checks and a quarantine period after the flight.

The airline adds that it is planning to resume return flights from Japan to Vietnam pending “approval from the relevant authorities”, and that it is also hoping to resume flights to South Korea, China, Taiwan, Laos, and Cambodia.

The Hanoi People’s Committee has permitted eight hotels to quarantine foreigners when they enter Vietnam in order to prevent COVID-19 spread, Vietnam Insider reported.

Those being quarantined at these hotels will have to pay their own costs, according to a post on Monday on the verified Facebook account of the Vietnamese government.

Related: It’s official: Vietnam Airlines resumes international flights

The eight include:

1. Hoa Binh Hotel at 27 Ly Thuong Kiet Street, Hang Bai Ward, Hoan Kiem District.
2. InterContinental Westlake Hanoi at 5 Tu Hoa Street, Quang An Ward, Tay Ho District.
3. Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi at 15 Ngo Quyen Street, Hoan Kiem District.
4. Muong Thanh Grand Xa La Hotel at 66 Phuc La, Xa La Urban Area, Ha Dong District.
5. Binh An 3 Hotel in Lam Nghiep Hamlet, Minh Phu Commune, Soc Son District.
6. Crowne Plaza West Hanoi at 36 Le Duc Tho Street, My Dinh 2 Ward, Nam Tu Liem District.
7. Binh An 1 Hotel in Binh An Hamlet, Trung Gia Commune, Soc Son District.
8. Wyndham Garden Hanoi at HH01 To Huu Street, Van Phuc Ward, Ha Dong District.

According to the Vietnam Insider, since September 1, arrivals to Vietnam have had to pay for the cost of their mandatory 14-day quarantine, the government said.

Stays at collective quarantine centers in the Southeast Asian nation had been free of charge, but people could opt to spend their quarantine at local hotels for a fee.

Those foreigners who are allowed to enter Vietnam and who will stay in the country for less than 14 days will not be subject to collective quarantine but they have to strictly adhere to COVID-19 prevention rules.

Hanoi allows 8 hotels to provide quarantine services for foreigners.

Vietnam began denying entry to foreign nationals on March 22 but the government allows foreign experts, skilled workers, investors, and diplomats to enter the country on a case-by-case basis.

The nation has suspended international flights since March 25 to slow the spread of COVID-19.

Since then, charter flights to the country have only been arranged to bring in experts, skilled workers, and diplomats, and to repatriate Vietnamese citizens stranded in other nations and territories due to the pandemic.

Vietnam has reported zero local coronavirus infections for 12 consecutive days, with the tally reaching 1,063, recoveries 926, and deaths 35.

Reporting by Viet Toan @ Tuoi Tre