Eric's Insight: Joint Covid fight good for community building

Covid outbreaks can be a double-edged sword. While the Covid pandemic has directly estranged international contacts, the joint fight against the spikes also provided opportunities for the neighboring countries to show goodwill to each other and thus foster a stronger sense of community with a shared future .

A shipment of 500,000 doses of Sinovac vaccines arrive in Thailand from China in June 2021. (Photo/VNA)

Amid the recent Covid spikes in Vietnam, the Chinese Ministry of National Defence presented 300,000 doses of Vero-Cell vaccine to its Vietnamese counterpart on February 8, according a post on the Vietnam Plus network.

This presents a latest Chinese action that is conducive to joint building of the China-ASEAN community of shared future, as was proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013. When the Covid broke out in China’s Wuhan in early 2020, Vietnam offered the Chinese side 500,000 US dollars' worth of medical supplies.

Another article on the same website said the Thailand’s Centre for COVID-19 Situation Administration (CCSA) on February 11 approved a proposal to donate 500,000 to 1 million AstraZeneca doses to Myanmar, 300,000 to Laos, 300,000 to Vietnam, and more to others.

The Thai proposal for vaccine sharing is a generous deed that showed the country’s sense of responsibility in the Mekong river basin, or the ASEAN community at large. ASEAN has been envisioned to be a peaceful, stable and resilient community with enhanced capacity to respond effectively to challenges by 2025. 

Thailand is the only founding member of ASEAN on the Indochina peninsula, and its indexes on social-economic development have long been higher than those of other Mekong countries. However, the country’s Covid conditions are also grave.

According to the February 15 statistics on BERNAMA.com, the number of total confirmed Thai cases reached 2,608,227, more than the Vietnamese sum of 2,540,273; while the percentage of fully-vaccinated population in Thailand is 70.65%, lower than the Vietnamese figure of 74.59%.

In the Philippines, Laos and Indonesia, the vaccination rate stands at 55.63%, 53.49% and 50.17% respectively, and these ASEAN nations are obviously where vaccines are urgently needed.

For Myanmar, the vaccinated percentage is not available at BERNAMA for the time being. Luckily, the ASEAN rotating chair Cambodia already sent the country 3 million face masks, 200,000 N95 masks, 100,000 goggles and more during the Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen’s visit last month.

We all wish the Covid could end soon, but the evil does persist. Since we have to face it, why not turn the challenges into opportunities to increase regional goodwill and community building. It’s good time to identify who is our true friend. 

(The writer Eric Wang Shixue is an English editor with the Mekong Magazine based in Kunming, Yunnan province. The view in the article does not necessarily represent that of Yunnan Gateway.)