To my knowledge, recent past administration quite literally made a step by step "playbook on how to manage a pandemic" and the current administration quite literally completely ignored it, or something close to this.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/obama-team-left-pandemic...
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-ap-top-news-virus-ou...
The unit was disbanded. Agree or disagree why it was disbanded, nothing was created to replace it. This is one of many examples of how things were/are worse than they needed to be.
Think Vietnam eventually started getting hit though because of other countries lack of handling things, tourism, and the general fact that they're not by any means a rich country. So, they did surprisingly well given what they had, but eventually got dragged down by the rest of the bullshitters.
This is all off the top of my head in remembering things though, may be incorrect.
And before you tell me it's a dictatorship so they have hidden the true numbers, I'm pretty sure if it had been the case it would have been at the forefront of the protests last year.
I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I do think COVID fear has been massively overblown.