Long weekend becomes 9 week lockdown for AP Vietnam reporter

VUNG TAU, Vietnam (AP) — I wake up as the loudspeaker outside my window starts the community broadcast at 7 a.m. I try to recall the date. Vietnam’s pandemic lockdown has been so long I’ve lost my sense of time. I now count by weeks.

This is the ninth I’ve been stuck in Vung Tau, a seaside resort more than 1,500 kilometers (900 miles) from my home in Hanoi.

I get out of bed, keeping to my routine of yoga before breakfast. As I roll out the mat, the broadcast gives the latest pandemic news and blares out a propaganda-style song: “Citizens, let’s join forces in this fight so COVID disappears...”

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I got to Vung Tau for a long weekend to see my partner in mid-July.

In normal times, it is packed with vacationers escaping cities for fresh air, sunshine and delicious seafood.

As I started my travels, a new outbreak emerged in Vietnam but I was confident — and I believe the country was confident — that it would be able to stop it quickly, just as it had previous ones. Until then, Vietnam had reported just over 8,000 cases and 35 virus deaths and won global praise for its pandemic success.

The delta variant's arrival changed everything.

The strain spread like wildfire through factories in industrial zones, into markets and on to communities across the country. In Ho Chi Minh City, the country’s largest with 10 million people, authorities ordered a city-wide lockdown. Soon it was expanded to include the entire southern region, home to more than a third of the country's 98 million people.

Inter-provincial public transport was halted, and air travel from Ho Chi Minh City was suspended, including my return flight home. I was stranded in Vung Tau as the city announced its first ever COVID-19 case.

It didn’t seem like a big deal...