Vietnam best Covid-19 fighter in the world: Politico

The prestigious news outlet mapped the performance of 30 leading economies by plotting their public health and economic outcomes and grouping them based on whether they have instituted light, moderate or severe restrictions on commerce and social interactions.

The matrix included countries and territories' economic outcomes, including the benchmarks of GDP, unemployment and fiscal stimulus packages and health outcomes based on testing, infection and death statistics provided by health ministries and government authorities and graphed by Worldometer and Johns Hopkins University.

As seen in the ranking chart, Vietnam stands at the furthest end with "better public health outcome," with Taiwan coming close, followed by New Zealand, South Korea, Iceland, Argentina and Australia.

The interactive map created by Politico on how 30 economies performed in terms of public health and economic outcomes due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Covid-19 pandemic has affected 213 countries and territories around the world and claimed over 346,000 lives. However, Vietnam, a country of 94 million people that shares a land border with China, where the first novel coronavirus cases were reported last year, has reported only 325 infections and no deaths.

Vietnam has also stayed first on the economic outcomes front, ahead of Bangladesh, China, India and Indonesia.

The International Monetary Fund has forecast Vietnam’s GDP to grow at 2.7 percent this year, higher than that of its regional peers, and it is expected to rebound strongly to 7 percent in 2021.

Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said at a National Assembly session Wednesday that the pandemic has severely damaged all sectors, and the earlier economic expansion target of 6.8 percent will be difficult to achieve.

The government had earlier mentioned a revised GDP growth targets of 4.5 percent or 5.4 percent this year, depending on the global situation.

Politico also noted that Vietnam had enacted light restrictions from May 23, with most businesses, offices and schools allowed to stay open, "sometimes at reduced capacity."

Vietnam started a 15-day social distancing period on April 1 and extended it for certain high risk localities by another week. Since April 23, the government has allowed most non-essential services except karaoke parlors and discos to resume operations.

Businesses and schools have been gradually reopening since the end of last month and the country has gone 39 days without community transmission of the Covid-19 virus. It is yet to open its doors to foreign tourists and international flights remain suspended.

Politico stresses that the more advanced economies, the U.S. and European countries such as the U.K., France, Italy and Spain, have been facing "worse public health and economic outcomes, with higher death rate of Covid-19 than the rest of the world and stricter lockdowns to contain the coronavirus."

The U.S. has the world's highest death toll at nearly 100,000.