In mid-July, Vietnam still shone as a Covid-19 outlier. No reported deaths, and months without a locally transmitted case.
Fans packed into football stadiums, schools had reopened, and customers returned to their favourite cafes.
"We were already back to normal life," said Mai Xuan Tu, a 27-year-old from Da Nang in central Vietnam.
Like many in the coastal city wildly popular with domestic visitors, she works in the tourism industry and was slowly resuming bookings for the tour company she founded.
But by the end of July, Da Nang was the epicentre of a new coronavirus outbreak, the source of which has stumped scientists. Cases suddenly surged after 99 straight days with no local transmissions.
Last week the city saw the country's first Covid-19 death, a toll that has since risen to 10.
Successful response
Just weeks earlier, Vietnam was praised globally as a rare pandemic success story.
The communist country acted fast and decisively where other nations faltered, closing its borders to almost all travellers except returning citizens as early as March.
It quarantined and tested anyone who entered the country in government facilities, and conducted widespread contact-tracing and testing nationwide.
So what went wrong?
"I'm not sure anything went wrong," says Prof Michael Toole, an epidemiologist and principal research fellow at the Burnet Institute in Melbourne.
Most countries that thought they had the pandemic under control have seen resurgences, he says, pointing to a long list including Spain, Australia and Hong Kong.
"Like in the first wave, Vietnam has responded quickly and forcefully."
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