The Vietnamese Government has decided to cancel lockdowns applied for the past year and a half after the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) slumped in the third quarter, according to the News Agency of Nigeria.
In a directive posted on the government’s website Wednesday, the government requested that all provincial authorities temporarily suspend strict social distancing measures and cancel lockdowns applied 18 months ago to combat COVID-19.
Should it become necessary to apply lockdowns district-wide or on a province-wide scale, provincial authorities would have to ask the government for approval.
Companies and people were now allowed to travel within Vietnam but still need to comply with COVID regulations.
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The government has issued three directives outlining Vietnam’s strongest measures for preventing and controlling the coronavirus, allowing provincial authorities to apply lockdowns in localities.
Those directives mandated strict social distancing throughout the country using the following motto: “Families have to be distanced from families, villages should be distanced from villages provinces should be distanced from provinces.’’
Those directives have seriously affected all sectors of the economy, leading the country’s GDP to shrink by 6.17 percent in the third quarter of this year.
The nation’s sharpest record quarterly dropped since 1986.
This brought the nation’s GDP growth in the first nine months of 2021 to only 1.42 percent over the same period last year.
The Vietnamese government had set a target of 6.5 percent GDP growth for 2021.
Vietnam has reported nearly 21,000 coronavirus-related deaths during the pandemic.
As of Oct. 12, the country had fully vaccinated over 16 million people out of a total population of 98 million, one of the lowest immunisation rates in Asia.
