Page 65 - GHES-2-4

Global Health Economics and
Sustainability

ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE
Effectiveness of the lockdown policy in Vietnam

during the COVID-19 pandemic

2,3
Duy-Ha Lai 1 , Thai-Ha Le * , and Binh Tran-Nam 4
1 Fulbright School of Public Policy and Management, Fulbright University Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City,
Vietnam
2 VinFuture Foundation, Hanoi, Vietnam
3 IPAG Business School, Paris, France
4 School of Accounting, Auditing and Taxation, UNSW School of Business, University of New South
Wales (UNSW Sydney), Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Abstract

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, in the absence of vaccines and effective
treatments, governments worldwide have implemented lockdown policies as non-
pharmaceutical interventions to flatten the infection curve. This study evaluates the
effectiveness of containment policies implemented at the local level in Vietnam. Data
were synthesized from 143 policy interventions across 49 provinces and centrally run
cities from April 27 to October 1, 2021, and an interrupted time series (ITS) analysis
was used to estimate the effectiveness of each intervention. A random-effects meta-
analysis was then conducted to combine the results based on different criteria. This
analysis found that Directives No.15/CT-TTg and No.16/CT-TTg were successfully
Academic editor: implemented in the provinces of Northern Midlands and Mountains, Red River Delta,
Mihajlo Jakovljevic M.D. Ph.D. MAE
North Central, Central Coastline, and Central Highlands. However, these directives
*Corresponding author: were less effective when employed in the Southeast and the Mekong Delta areas.
Thai-Ha Le
(thai1@e.ntu.edu.sg) Furthermore, the ITS analysis indicates that Ho Chi Minh City and provinces in the
Southeast region implemented stringent lockdown directives later than other
Citation: Lai, D., Le, T., & Tran- regions, leading to the loss of control over the pandemic during the study period.
Nam, B. (2024). Effectiveness of the
lockdown policy in Vietnam during In-depth studies on lockdown interventions could provide valuable insights for
the COVID-19 pandemic. Global policymakers in managing future outbreaks, particularly considering the time
Health Econ Sustain, 2(4):3423. required for the development of vaccines and drugs.
https://doi.org/10.36922/ghes.3423
Received: April 15, 2024
Keywords: COVID-19; Social distancing; Interrupted time series; Vietnam
Accepted: May 29, 2024
Published Online: August 22, 2024
Copyright: © 2024 Author(s).
This is an Open-Access article 1. Introduction
distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution From 2020 to 2022, the COVID-19 pandemic has swept across the globe, forcing
License, permitting distribution, governments to make difficult choices with significant trade-off decisions when
and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is implementing restrictive policies, especially between economic prosperity and public
properly cited. health. Although there has been considerable debate regarding the effectiveness of
Publisher’s Note: AccScience containment policies, research indicates that lockdowns and social distancing measures
Publishing remains neutral with can break the chain of infection (Haug et al., 2020). Vietnam successfully implemented
regard to jurisdictional claims in
published maps and institutional strict social distancing policies, which helped flatten the infection curve in the first,
affiliations. second, and third waves of COVID-19 (spanning from January 23, 2020, to April 26,

Volume 2 Issue 4 (2024) 1 https://doi.org/10.36922/ghes.3423