🇱🇦 Laos had less than 50 cases. Now it's reaching 1000.

Hello friends!

Over the next week (and a bit) we’ll be checking in on the pandemic in each and every one of the Asean member states — and Timor Leste, of course! 

Life, or an approximation of it, has chugged along in the world and that has sometimes eclipsed that we are still very much in the shit. 

Today is the region’s strongest example of how surprising and vicious this virus is. After a year of dodging the high case count and destruction we see elsewhere through a combination of strong planning and sheer luck, Laos is now facing a decisive moment. 

The official death toll still stands at a beautiful zero, but that new case by day count ticks slowly upwards.

Here is our correspondent in Laos on what it’s like for the country to peer over the edge. 

Rarely can you blame COVID-19 on any one person. It’s a global pandemic. There’s plenty of blame to go around.

Well, here in Laos we’re in the early stages of our scariest outbreak to date. And the people have found their scapegoat: the notorious Case 59.

Case 59, and her known associates, have done themselves no favours. Their actions in April were a case study in recklessness. They’ve probably fueled dozens of infections and played no small part in Laos’ second wave.

To this point, Laos had skated through the COVID crisis with nary a nick. Officially, as of April 1, there were 49 cases — not a typo — and zero deaths.

Even if you took that story with a dose of scepticism, it’s not like there was obvious evidence to the contrary. It’s a small country. You can sense what’s up.

Life in Laos was normal. Everything was open; hardly anyone wore masks. There was no reason to.

The Achilles’ heel was always the borders. Laos has 5000 km of borders with five countries. Much of that is a river. If someone wants to cross illegally and skip quarantine, it’s pretty hard to stop them (not to say I told you so).

So we arrive at Case 59, a 25-year-old Lao woman studying in Vientiane.

The official story is that on April 6, she visited Savannakhet, a city in the mid-south of the country, to link up with three people. One was a Lao woman. Two were Thai blokes who’d hired a boatman to smuggle them across the Mekong.

They partied. They partied at a hotel; they partied at a karaoke bar. They took the overnight bus to Vientiane, spent the morning at a karaoke bar and partied intermittently throughout the week. Case 59 did squeeze in an English lesson somewhere in there.

The Thai boys and the Lao friend took another illegal boat home. They didn’t feel well. A few days later they called their friend in Vientiane and informed her they were positive.

Inexplicably, Case 59 loafed around a few days before discovering that she too was infected.

Since then Laos’ caseload has erupted. As of May 4, there were 966 confirmed cases. At least some of these are the more infectious UK variant.

Vientiane is the epicenter. But cases have popped up around the country and every province is in lockdown.

People are on edge. Everybody’s masked. Roads are empty. Police vans make the rounds, blaring out messages to stay home. You can pop out for an errand, but linger past curfew (7 p.m.? 8? 9? Nobody knows) and you’ll wind up on a plastic chair at a police checkpoint having an uncomfortable chat.

On Facebook, Case 59 and her associates are not very popular. Lao people are mad. They blame her and the “Covid 3” for screwing things up. This is out of character. Lao people don’t tend to name and shame. It’s too direct, too hostile. Face is a thing and it is not to be torn down casually.

Case 59, by contrast, has been identified as “Tyna.” She recovered from COVID and was promptly arrested, according to the Laotian Times. The “Covid 3” face charges on both sides of the river.

By Lao standards, this amounts to a public flogging.

But it’s hard not to feel these superspreaders are just the scapegoats.

C’mon. We all knew this could happen.

Take the river boats. They’ve stopped. But until recently it was an open secret that with a bit of lubrication you could get across the Mekong. Everybody knew about the “midnight boats.” Hell, I often saw them at high noon, their contents draped in tarps.

Take Pi Maii. One of the unfortunate breaks of this outbreak is that it came just before the new year’s holiday. The party was cancelled last year thanks to COVID. This year’s celebration was more muted than usual. But I doubt it’s a coincidence that the caseload has grown since then.

Last but not least, the migrant workers. Thousands of Lao labourers have been coming home over the past year as lockdowns in Thailand cut off their income. Some return legally. Others don’t. The Lao government and village chiefs try to catch everyone and make sure they do a full two-week quarantine. But it’s a leaky setup.

Sometimes there’s a bit of a landlocked mentality in Laos. There can be this sense that Laos will somehow stay safe in the eye of the tempest. That the boogeyman is stomping around downstairs but Laos is hidden in the attic closet.

Perhaps after a year of getting through the pandemic with a clean sheet, we’d all been lulled into a sense of safety. It was good while it lasted.