Trujillo

Put an ad up on the Rimping bulletin boards. 

"People travelling on vaccine related passports will still have to be tested as they can be host to the virus."

 

Source?

 

"One case of the vicious Brazilian P.1 variant has already been found in ASQ, reported on April  23, 2021."

 

How can a virus be "vicious"? It isn't sentient so it can't be "deliberately cruel or violent" or "immoral." 

"It boils down to this, for me anyway. It makes no difference what you choose to believe or what source you get your information, the fact is its now mandatory to wear a mask, and you either follow the directive and wear a mask or pay the fine.Simple as that."

 

 

I agree that the government has everyone by the short hairs, and we are all to oblige, but hopefully, this nation is still free enough for residents to question the merit of various maneuvers it makes while dutifully kowtowing to the covid tsar's edicts. While reluctantly following the new regulation, it is fair --  and I would hope incumbent on everyone -- to genuinely reflect on why it is required to wear a "protective device" when you are alone with no one else in sight, or when you are required to contravene the guidance of the WHO regarding masks and "vigorous activity," vis a vis exercising. 

With exercising, I feel like I'm being required to take up smoking cigarettes, "just for a while until we're out of the woods, here. Don't worry about what some medical organization says, we know better."

Since they closed the fitness centers and gyms, my cardio of choice is bicycling, vigorous bicycling, during which I am supposed to wear a mask, even though the World HEALTH Organization says not to? (I'm hearing Homer Simpson in my head saying, "Silly WHO...") 

Wearing a mask taking my dog for a walk, when there is not another soul in sight (but there are CCTV cameras...) just makes me feel like an idiot, at least it's not endangering my health. 

 

Perhaps one might reflect on the oft-quoted passage from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s  letter from the Birmingham jail....

 

Chiang Mai had 89 "cases" yesterday (reported today). I have no information regarding how many if any were symptomatic, ill or asymptomatic. This information, virtually always lacking in (sensational) news reports, is very germane. 

 

Again, I have to wonder, is the "covid zero" aim worth pursuing as an achievable goal? Is it sound reasoning to again lock down Chiang Mai simply because 89/1,764,000th of the population of the province tests positive for the virus in a day (that's 0.005% of all the people in the province)? Can we get that figure down to only four one-hundred thousandths of one percent? Probably. Let's hope so, for everyone's sake.

 

By the way, I know that some people are gleeful about the blanket mandate for masks, as for some, wearing a mask is the new hairshirt. 

"That is like suggesting that the only time carrying a gun should be prohibited is when you want to shoot someone."

 

Huh? "Is that mask loaded?"

 

I don't really follow your "logic," but as if I need to explain, my point is that a prophylactic is useful only in situations that merit its use. 
 

So you walk around all day with a condom on, just in case you might end up shagging someone that day? 

Would you carry an open umbrella every day outside regardless of whether it's sunny or not? (Just following the guidance, in case a weather front moves in.)

Would you carry a hunting rifle all the time just in case you happened to pass by a shooting range? 

Do you wear your reading glasses all the time just in case you need to read? 

 

 

 

 

Can I mention that Thailand is a member of the World Health Organization (WHO), and as such, should adhere to the organization's guidelines and principles?

 

The WHO says (bold added): "When outside, wear a mask if you cannot maintain physical distance from others. Some examples are busy markets, crowded streets and bus stops."

 

The WHO says (bold added): "Even when you’re in an area of COVID-19 transmission, masks should not be worn during vigorous physical activity because of the risk of reducing your breathing capacity."

 

Source: WHO

 

The Thai government is requiring us to break WHO protocol by wearing masks in situations where the organization does not advise this (such as walking alone with no other people near you), and which can be actually hazardous to your health (such as jogging).

Being threatened by fines for adhering to WHO protocol (not wearing a mask while riding a bicycle, for instance) is ludicrous.  

 

You know, we snigger at some of the asinine things the government routinely does, as mostly they're not things that endangers anyone or ends up affecting the masses, but this time is different. 

And to think that Thailand is allowed to be a member of the WHO but Taiwan is not. 

 

"Sorry if you have not received a response as quickly as you would have hoped."        

 

How long is the normal response time? Is two weeks too soon to be asking this question? 

Even if masks were 100% effective against aerosolized breath carrying a virus (which is another issue), why would it be useful to wear one when a person is alone, with no one near him, say in a park or on a vacant sidewalk or taking out the garbage at your own house, etc.?

 

Would this not be like driving your motorcycle while wearing a helmet, then arriving at the park to take a walk and keeping your helmet on as you stroll around the grounds. Would you advocate this out of an "abundance of caution," or what? If this makes sense to you, please explain your reasoning to me. 

Dante99, I did include that information in this line: "Vaccinated people should continue to wear a mask in many indoor situations, to help contribute to a culture of mask wearing."

 

 

Here is the actual MIT study: 

 

A guideline to limit indoor airborne transmission of COVID-19

 

Here are the key paragraphs regarding outdoor transmission (hyperlinks active in link above): 

 

"Further evidence for the dominance of indoor airborne transmission has come from an analysis of 7,324 early cases outside the Hubei Province, in 320 cities across mainland China (32). The authors found that all clusters of three or more cases occurred indoors, 80% arising inside apartment homes and 34% potentially involving public transportation; only a single transmission was recorded outdoors.
Finally, the fact that face mask directives have been more effective than either lockdowns or social distancing in controlling the spread of COVID-19 (22, 33) is consistent with indoor airborne transmission as the primary driver of the global pandemic."

 

Citing the CNBC article in the post above (MIT-researchers-say-youre-no-safer-from-covid-indoors-at-6-feet-or-60-feet-in-new-study) is this [bold added]: 

 

"As for social distancing outdoors, MIT professors Martin Z. Bazant, who teaches chemical engineering and applied mathematics, says it makes almost no sense and that doing so with masks on is “kind of crazy.”

“If you look at the air flow outside, the infected air would be swept away and very unlikely to cause transmission. There are very few recorded instances of outdoor transmission.” he said. “Crowded spaces outdoor could be an issue, but if people are keeping a reasonable distance of like 3 feet outside, I feel pretty comfortable with that even without masks, frankly.”

Bazant says this could possibly explain why there haven’t been spikes in transmission in states like Texas or Florida that have reopened businesses without capacity limits."

 

What will happen when the US CDC confirms this, which seems likely in the next day or so? How will Thailand react? (This is a rhetorical question, in case anyone can't figure that out...) 

 

By the way, in my opinion, seeing Thais (or any people) putting a baby mask on a toddler is really a tragedy. This is wrong on so many levels....

All this just as the MIT study is making headlines. 

 

MIT-researchers-say-youre-no-safer-from-covid-indoors-at-6-feet-or-60-feet-in-new-study

 

Regarding outdoor masking (bold added): 

 

"As for social distancing outdoors, MIT professors Martin Z. Bazant, who teaches chemical engineering and applied mathematics, says it makes almost no sense and that doing so with masks on is “kind of crazy.”

“If you look at the air flow outside, the infected air would be swept away and very unlikely to cause transmission. There are very few recorded instances of outdoor transmission.” he said. “Crowded spaces outdoor could be an issue, but if people are keeping a reasonable distance of like 3 feet outside, I feel pretty comfortable with that even without masks, frankly.”

Bazant says this could possibly explain why there haven’t been spikes in transmission in states like Texas or Florida that have reopened businesses without capacity limits."

 

Moreover, even Apparatchik Fauci is saying the CDC is about to relax its masking guidance. 

 

Of course as of today, at least 48 provinces in Thailand have instituted mandatory, all-the-time masking, even when you are alone outside, or on a motorbike (seriously). 

Excel: "...but when people actually started to be ill and go to the hospitals the real scale of the contagion is now being realised."

 

Sorry, you don't understand.

People here who test positive are automatically hospitalized, even WITHOUT being ill. Those who are asymptomatic or just sick, in the way we are familiar with the symptoms of the flu, go home, and stay as isolated as we always have done in these instances. And get better.  This is how it works around the world.

 

As one poster said, you can do this at a low level but it does not scale well at all. Of course hospitals will be filled quickly if you put every positive test "case" in there. 

 

"Thailand has a policy of admitting into care anyone who tests positive for COVID-19, even those without symptoms."

 

Is there another country on the planet that does this? Puts every single person who has a positive test in hospital or field hospital quarantine? Thailand's hospitalization rate is 100%. Are we the only country doing this? 

 

What I can't understand is the people in the photo lining up to be tested. If you are not sick, i.e. no symptoms, why would you risk putting yourself in a forced, group quarantine situation for 14 days? 

 

 

Canceling the Walking Street is not the end of the world, but I think if Thailand wants to steer the ship toward reopening in the next few years, it needs to do two things: Make a better, more realistic risk assessment regarding the virus that causes Covid-19; and make efforts to lower the temperature of fear among many Thais, which has been fostered by not educating the average citizen about the actual nature of the situation. 

 

Case in point: I had dinner at an outdoor stall with a person who continually raised a common cloth mask to her face, looking pensively from side to side. Asked what she was doing, her response was: "I'm afraid of covid." She was, incidentally, not over 70 years old with an underlying medical problem. 

 

You could say this behavior is innocent and doesn't matter, but in fact it's very significant. This woman is doing risk assessment not from facts, but from terror. While the comparison is imperfect, about 50 people have died every day in Thailand since the beginning of the year in traffic accidents (and 2,914 people injured every day). Over the past 467 days in Thailand, 0.25 people have died each day with covid. Which activity is riskier? 

 

Currently, the Thai government is putting every single person who tests positive for the virus that causes Covid-19 in a hospital or field hospital, regardless of whether the person is sick or not. This program necessarily instills fear. Can you imagine if this were the program in the United States, when yesterday over 66,000 people tested positive?  How would that even work (civil liberties aside)? 

 

And according to this article from The Economist (In-clinical-and-real-world-trials-chinas-sinovac-underperforms) 

"THE LATEST results for China’s CoronaVac vaccine, developed by Sinovac Biotech, a Beijing-based pharmaceutical company, were disappointing for the aspiring scientific and technological powerhouse. Phase-three trials, which were conducted on health-care workers in Brazil, yielded an efficacy rate of just 50.7% (with a 95% confidence interval of 35.7% to 62.2%), just barely above the 50% threshold set by the World Health Organisation for covid-19 vaccines. The results of a real-world trial released a week earlier were even worse: the vaccine was estimated to be just 49.6% effective (11.3% to 71.4%) against symptomatic covid-19 cases; when asymptomatic infections were included, this figure dropped to a dismal 35.1%."

 

Yet we have this:

 

"The Sinovac vaccine provides as much as “99.4 per cent immunity against Covid-19 a month after the second dose”, Chulalongkorn University virology specialist and chief of the Centre of Excellence in Clinical Virology Dr Yong Poovorawan said in a Facebook post on Thursday (April 22).

He was citing a study on immunity by the centre and Banphaeo General Hospital in Samut Sakhon."

 

Source: Thai specialist: Sinovac can provide up to 99.4% immunity

 

Regardless of which source you think is more trustworthy, there is a serious messaging problem here. 

 

I want to add a personal note. I want more than anything to get back to some sense of normalcy and I believe that the more facts the public knows, the better. The fact that the public here is either misinformed or ill-informed contributes to the problem. 
 

This is not solely an issue for Thailand; "A recent survey found that more than one-third of Americans overestimate by as much as a factor of 10 the probability a person with COVID-19 will require hospitalization.

Researchers involved in the Franklin Templeton/Gallup study asked Americans in December what 'percentage of people who have been infected by the coronavirus needed to be hospitalized.' The correct answer is not precisely known, the authors note, but the best available estimates place the figure between 1 and 5 percent (unless you are in Thailand, where 100% of those who tests positive are hospitalized).

 

Source: Americans-are-wildly-misinformed-about-the-risk-of-hospitalization-from-covid-19-survey-shows-here's-why

 

 

----------------------------------------------------

vis-à-vis outdoor transmissions: 

 

What the science says: 

 

As Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, told CNN last weekend, “We’ve known for a year that outdoor infections are extremely rare.” Exactly how rare?

• According to a systematic review of peer-reviewed research published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, the odds of indoor transmission are about 19 times as great as the odds of outdoor transmission.

• Not all outdoor environments are equally safe, though: Unmasked interactions that involved prolonged, frequent contact, for example, were associated with higher risk of outdoor transmission.

• “Our takeaway from this is that it’s not impossible to get an infection outdoors, even though from what is published, clearly the proportion of when that happens is much lower,” Nooshin Razani, one of the study’s authors, told The Washington Post.

What this means in practice: “Transmissions do not take place between solitary individuals going for a walk, transiently passing each other on the street, a hiking trail or a jogging track,” Dr. Paul E. Sax, a professor at Harvard Medical School, wrote in NEJM Journal Watch. “That biker who whizzes by without a mask poses no danger to us, at least from a respiratory virus perspective.”

Source (original article has active hyperlinks) -- New York Times: Is It Time to End Outdoor Masking? “We’ve known for a year that outdoor infections are extremely rare.”

"Just one coronavirus infection in every thousand cases occurs outdoors, according to contract tracing data from Ireland.

Data from the Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC), which monitors infections in the Republic of Ireland, revealed that of the 232,164 cases of Covid-19 recorded up to March 24 this year, 262 were a result of outdoor transmission.

The number of infections that occurred outdoors represented just 0.1 per cent of the total."

 

Source -- Evening Standard: One in 1,000 covid cases outdoors Ireland study

 

 

I have repeatedly tried the Contact Us feature as well as the email for support and have never gotten any reply. 

 

I am trying to contact an administrator (or THE administrator). 

 

How would I go about this and get a result? 

"Owing to a rumor that COVID-19 Rapid Tests are being sold online and that the public can buy them and test themselves at home, the Department of Medical Sciences has clarified that the test kit is a test for antibodies only; it cannot detect the virus or indicate if the user is infected with the virus. The rapid tester should be used and the results interpreted only by specialists or medical technicians. If home users get a negative reading in the result, they might think they do not have the virus and then unintentionally spread the virus to others. So the department has warned the public not to buy the COVID-19 Rapid Test and use it themselves.
Category : NEWS ROOM
April 21, 2021"

 

(Bold added)

 

APPROVED SOURCE: 

The Government Public Relations Department

 

 

 

 "...the smart tinfoil hat that can track your ether trail and let you know if you are wearing it wrong or even if you forget to wear it at all."

 

Bingo!!!

Let's put this in another, less politized context. 

 

If the SARS-CoV-2 virus were dengue fever-carrying mosquitoes and masks were mosquito repellent, you can be absolutely sure that by now pretty much everyone would be saying that this insect spray doesn't work. 

"Which alternative Thailand do you live in?"

 

I live in Chiang Mai. 

 

“Face masks should not be worn by healthy individuals to protect themselves from acquiring respiratory infection because there is no evidence to suggest that face masks worn by healthy individuals are effective in preventing people from becoming ill.”

-- JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association)

 

Masking: A Careful Review of the Evidence

-- American Institute for Economic Research

 

"While the evidence may seem conflicted, the evidence (including the peer-reviewed evidence) actually does not support its use (a mask) and leans heavily toward masks having no significant impact in stopping spread of the Covid virus."

 

 

Masking Children: Tragic, Unscientific, and Damaging

-- American Institute for Economic Research

 

"Children do not readily acquire SARS-CoV-2 (very low risk), spread it to other children or teachers, or endanger parents or others at home. This is the settled science. In the rare cases where a child contracts Covid virus it is very unusual for the child to get severely ill or die. Masking can do positive harm to children – as it can to some adults. But the cost benefit analysis is entirely different for adults and children – particularly younger children. Whatever arguments there may be for consenting adults – children should not be required to wear masks to prevent the spread of Covid-19."

 

And finally, Oh Canada:

 

Health Canada ….“discovered during a preliminary risk assessment that the masks contain microscopic graphene particles that, when inhaled, could cause severe lung damage.”

 

"Radio-Canada has obtained documents showing Health Canada warned of the potential for "early pulmonary toxicity" from the SNN200642 masks which are made in China and sold and distributed by Métallifer, a Quebec-based manufacturer."

-- edit: these are the ubiquitous blue "paper" masks that people seem to think have some efficacy. 

 

-- CBC News

 

 

 

 

These might provide some insight. 

 

Rich nations vaccinating a person each second; what about others?

 

According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, Thailand should get "widespread vaccination coverage" by "late 2022." 

 

85 poor countries will not have access to coronavirus vaccines...