Body temperature  at a Vietnamese hospital. (Photo: VNA)

"It was late January, just after the Lunar New Year. Vietnam had detected its first two cases of the new coronavirus days earlier, and the government was contacting companies with experience of medical testing for urgent help," wrote the article.

"The Vietnamese government is officially reporting a relatively small 270 cases and zero deaths. The public health experts say Vietnam was successful because it made early, decisive moves to restrict travel into the country, put tens of thousands of people into quarantine and quickly scaled up the use of tests and a system to track down people who might have been exposed to the virus."

RIA Novosti, one of Russia’s biggest news agencies, ran an article on Wednesday saying Vietnam’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been amazing. While many countries have struggled, Vietnam has contained the disease and had zero fatalities, the article said.

The reason lies in the effective preventive measures the Vietnamese Government has taken throughout the two waves of the pandemic, it said. The article also spoke of Vietnam’s international cooperation in this regard, saying the US Centers for Disease Control sent a delegation to the country in late February to learn from its experience in pandemic response. Vietnam now helps other countries in the fight, the agency wrote, by presenting them with hundreds of thousands of medical face masks.