bkkcanuck8

1 hour ago, cyril sneer said:

If people are wanting the vaccine for travel purposes then going home to get it is actually the best option. You’ll be provided with an NHS QR with proof of a genuine vaccine.

 

UK is now allowing home quarantine so that should reduce the cost by 2 grand. 

 

Not sure how long it will take for Thailand to come up with a system to show their vaccines are genuine, and then the country you’re travelling to to approve it.
 

Years I would say.

If you are traveling, you can request a certificate of immunization which I believe will state exactly what you have been immunized with (have to have a ticket first). 

As far as proving what they gave you, the government is the final authority on that. 

If the UK wants to do a serology test to see if you have antibodies in your system from immunization, they can do that on their own.

2 hours ago, sucit said:

Then why do countries that did not lock down at all havedrastic drops in numbers of cases? Can you answer that? 
 

The answer is the drastic drops are everywhere, lockdowns or no lockdowns, because the virus moves through the populations at this point no matter what you do. 
 

For the life of me I can’t help but just tell you all how you cannot see how obvious so much of this is. For example, Thailand’s borders are closed. Thailand is infected with covid! It makes zero sense to leave the borders closed, that is very detrimental to the country. It’s not as if we have 14 cases here or something controllable. How is this not blatantly obvious? 

Which country, which days and what was the vaccination rate -- each country is different. 

In the UK July 19th was the end of the lock-down... it was also also when the vaccination rate hit just around 70% for 2 doses, more for one dose (on top of those that were not vaccinated but had covid - aka hard vaccinations - and the UK had a lot of those).   It would likely take something like 7 to 10 days to really start into the process of antibodies, so as the days go on more people should be somewhat protected from that day on.   The new cases were higher than they were now starting at between Jul 13th -> July 22, but from that point on the new cases per day from Jul 23 to now somewhat constant and it is still higher than it was from around Jan 24th to July 11th or so.   Thailand has no near that percentage receiving the first dose, let alone the 2nd... and likely won't be close to reaching it until sometime early next year at the earliest (Thailand also has far fewer that were immunized the hard way). 

The UK also blocked export of the vaccine early on -- even though other countries ordered some of that earlier... which is why all countries should exclude UK Pharmaceutical industry from any free trade agreements (and if they are part of it now - remove it)... as UK has shown that they are treating it as a national security dependent company and countries should react accordingly.

49 minutes ago, sandhurstmolonski said:

He is spot on , it's now well versed 

LOCKDOWNS DONT WORK , and cases don't matter , we are pumping out massive numbers here , the only way forward is high levels of vaccination .

But this lockdown nonsense is just that , it hinders active updated immunes and it destroys lives , nothing has changed here other than testing , it's time to be logical and cease all lockdown BS immediately .

Get on with life , get vaccinated , a functional immune required , but we cannot carry on like this , it's doesn't work and we tried prior .

 

Singapore model , cases not matter , vaccinations above 80 % over time , get on with life . Well said doctor .

Thailand tried lock-downs prior and they worked, China did as well and they worked, Korea has in the past and it worked (they are loosening up a bit now that they have a high vaccination rate).   If you stop reduce the contact between people to nominal, they have a very hard time transmitting the virus (it does not magically jump across long distances -- it is transmitted person to person).  If you have a dark-red zone - you lock it down, you then lock-it down district by district, muban by muban at a very granular level.  You test as many people as you can test as often as you can and quarantine infected households until they are clear...  You track and trace all contacts of those infected.  If you are really competent, those infected have limited contacts to infect another...  the cases rapidly drop to a nominal number, as a muban caseload drops to zero, you open it up.  As a district case-load drops to zero you remove it from lock-down.  In a month or two you will reduce the caseload across a dark-red zone to manageable levels where comprehensive and ongoing testing as well as tracking and tracing keeps it manageable.  If you are competent, you don't get to the point of having dark-red zones in the first place.  Then society can return to some sort of normalcy and start recovering.  You let it run wild like a forest fire and you will end up having people running for the hills.   If you had a 'fully vaccinated' population it also makes it more resistant and harder to transmit in the general population.  Simply put, if the controls were applied quickly and efficiently - a full lockdown of a city should not be necessary.  Incompetence in control and you end up in a mess which is what Thailand did the second time around.... Full vaccination in Thailand right now is a pipe-dream though because the government has been utterly incompetent and acquiring vaccines - the worst in the region for doing so....

Chulalongkorn is the top Thai University and ranks reasonably well international (not the top internationally but far far from the bottom).   The vaccine technology being used is also not new.  I don't doubt that Thailand has enough experience to develop a vaccine locally, I will wait to see how the testing phases turn out... but by then I am hoping I will not be looking for a vaccine shot.

10 minutes ago, Stargrazer9889 said:

I just hope that everyone who wants to get vaccinated, will be vaccinated soon. I also hope that

what ever vaccine they are given is accepted for them to be able to travel where ever they want to

as well.   Some countries are not accepting certain vaccines as being good enough.  Being vaccinated and surviving COVID if you

get it, is better than not being vaccinated and dying of COVID, don't you think?

Geezer

Dying of COVID is not my worst fear, it is the long COVID symptoms (i.e. neurological damage)....  if I die, I won't be complaining.

3 minutes ago, mommysboy said:

Why would they want to check it?   Other than perhaps to confirm you are not Thai.  Think too mut!

 

 

I have a sneaking suspicion that the expatvac through MoF was suppose to be different expat only registration as part of an unofficial agreement with the US ambassador (just a guess) [though once it is transferred to MoPH to administer it likely will be exactly the same for everyone].  If you read the site and the announcement it specifically lists a subset of foreigners in Thailand that are eligible for this registration [non-immigrant visas, permanent residence card, work permits along with diplomats and international organizations (my guess that means NGOs) - or foreigners with social security numbers... ].   Specifically excluded from the site were tourists (long term or otherwise) with the expectation that they would have to go home to be immunized (after all they are just tourists - no need wasting vaccine on people that can get them in a country with more supply)....   this exclusion was not an accident as it would have been easier to say foreign nationals in Thailand.

6 hours ago, billd766 said:

I registered on 1st August and I have just checked all my 3 email sites plus the spam folder in each one but nothing about vaccination dates yet.

The list was just handed over to MoPH a few days ago, you have to wait now on whatever processes, regulations etc. that they have.

1 hour ago, sucit said:

Your question is completely nonsensical. 
 

Thailand has increased restrictions, and cases have gone up. Have they not? 
 

Recently UK eased restrictions, and cases went down. 
 

The point here isn’t so much that easing lockdowns reduced infections, but the actual point is, it just doesn’t matter. People are making up the reasons for decreases in infections as they see fit. Humans are human, and people will cross closed borders, people will put on dirty masks, people will come home after shopping and infect loved ones (who wears masks with no contact at home?). Covid infection curves follow very similar patterns and taper off in similar ways. It has little to nothing to do with restrictions. 

 

I realize you will never get it, but lockdowns will be shown to have a net negative impact in the end, with little to no impact on the long term number of infections. 
 

The only question you need to be asking is to yourself, and the question is why you think lockdowns work. 

In China, the virus was out of control.  Strict controls reduced the outbreak to almost nothing and returned the country to a state of almost normalcy considering what the rest of the world would go through.  When the virus first started getting out of control in Thailand, Thailand implemented similar controls recommended by China's experience and the country became a safe haven for a year and the country returned to a state of almost normalcy compared to the rest of the world.   These controls do cause pain though, and the government a year later was averse to taking the same hard decisions and let the virus get out of control and as a result the economic pain is greater over a longer period of time.

8 minutes ago, smedly said:

sorry but I do not agree, you are over thinking this 

 

they won't be checking anything - why should they 

 

we gave our DOB - copy passport, they are not looking for people submitting fake doccuments - it is a simple registration for a vaccine - your passport is your Id - nothing more

The signup does not apply to all immigration status... no option for tourist visa, or visa waiver only for 'expats' here on one of the other visas (like Non-Imm O and work permit related ones).  When they ask for copies of your passport and visa pages, it usually means they plan to check it...  if not, why would they ask for that?  They would just ask for your passport number (like other sights do - as your ID).

2 minutes ago, steven100 said:

so the  Expatvac  registration  process resulted in a load of hogwash  ?    

 

was it fake  ?

did they do it so that other embassies (the US in particular)  would see thailand giving donated Pfizer to expats ??

 

 

I do not think it is fake, but the admin process expectations here were completely without foundation.  What did the website ask for when you logged in?  The normal details and then medical certificate from hospital from preconditions... but also your passport details with your visa page, photo page etc.  This was submitted to MoF.   After they verify this data it has to be transferred to MoPH.  That means they have to probably manually review every record that was submitted, take the passport data and then compare it to the immigration system and mark it verified or not.  This data then has to be transferred to the MoPH (which another indicated happened in the last few days - my guess - that Aug. 11th date mentioned).  The MoPH then has to go through and verify the medical certificates and import it into their system and prioritize the cases... once approved this data has to be referred to IT that would be responsible for electronically sending out appointments to you, me and everyone else and provide a way for you to confirm in 24 hours.  This process also takes time and is not immediate.  If we are lucky the first batch of people (60+ and pre-existing conditions) will start receiving appointments later on this week.

3 hours ago, Stargrazer9889 said:

If anybody believes any official number of deaths from COVID, you are truly mistaken.   Far more people have died all over the world, than what has been counted.  This includes Sweden, Canada, USA, Russia, Europe, China,  the ME, India, South America, Central America, and likely Asia, and Africa. Maybe Indonesia has reported closer to the actual number, but I believe that almost every country has had COVID deaths, that were classed as something else. 

 

 I hope that the doctor is right, and of course with most people in Asia who like to flaunt most rules, well lock down to them does not apply, does it?  Carry on.

Geezer

So you are saying the mortality rate is not something like 1.8% in Canada, that it is "far more" maybe 5%?   And USA is not 1.6% it is maybe 4.5%?   Or are you saying that the totals were wrong and 3 times more people got sick with severe COVID...   and so same mortality rate just had many more people die?   Can you show me where you get that idea from?  I don't see any evidence that that many people died in Canada....   Even the inept media in Canada would catch on to something like that... unless you are saying there is some massive conspiracy from the "free press" as well?  

15 minutes ago, jacko45k said:

The momentum in Thailand is not so great.... but even when the high number are reached, ie percentages of adults fully vaccinated, that does not mean we are done and dusted... it is simply move on to the next phase.

AS per the UK, with a fully vaccinated percentage of 76%  of adults, it still has daily new infections of >30,000 rising, with testing levels of 800,000/day, daily deaths still around 100, hospital admissions of >700 daily (these are surely symptomatic), over 5800 patients currently in hospital with 880 on ventilation. 

Is this Thailand's destiny?

Source.

How many of those hospital admissions are unvaccinated... if you can get vaccinated and refuse for personal reasons... then get hospitalized... sorry but that is on you.  I do however have sympathy that the nurses and doctors, who are already overworked, have to suffer from other people's stupidity...

12 minutes ago, DrJack54 said:

I don't recall that. 

Any recollection of where/who announced that.

 

Pretty sure it was the health minister, and it would have been when they announced ramping up the immunization program -- and the same time they announced it as mix and match -- to which WHO said they recommended against it.   WHO's position would be normal since the three phase approval process did not test mixed vaccines and thus were not approved (in the US and many other countries) with mixing in mind (though I personally cannot see how two different vaccines many weeks apart could be worse than the worse of the two - but then I am not an expert).   I would have seen it in the other newspaper or on this newsfeed....

54 minutes ago, NightSky said:

I heard from the wife’s familly village the elders are being told the first jab when available will be Sinovac not AstraZeneca as quoted above. Is it one rule for Bangkok and another for the villages? Or is it just a misprint?

 

 

They announced that a month ago - AZ first shot, sinovac second shot (bangkok and environments)....

And the reverse for the villages in provinces they have sinovac first and AZ second.  It is the govt way of getting more vaccines going at the same time.... they only receive so much AZ a month, and so much sinovac a month... so you cannot do 100% of one vaccine at the same time - and this is their answer.  Personally, of the two scenarios - I would go with sinovac first and AZ second.

20 minutes ago, Anton9 said:

Spanish flu was much worse than Covid 19, so you can't actually compare because it was a totally different animal.

It was killing healthy young people while covid MOSTLY kills elderly people with comorbidities.

Understand though that the Spanish Flu had a global mortality rate of around 10% (estimated) [United States mortality rate was less than that - maybe 3 times per capita as COVID-19], the first wave the virus was a minor nuisance, the second wave was the one that did all the damage (hooray for mutations).

As someone has mentioned, SARS-CoV-2 (causes COVID-19) is not originally a human virus, it was a Zoonotic virus that jumped to humans.  It is now mutating a bit at a time, and depending on what happens -- through natural selection it will become a virus more adapted to humans.  This process may lead to changes, we don't know.  We won't know yet what it will fully become.  SARS-CoV-1 came out of the block as a more dangerous virus, but we were able to contain it - pretty much at the point we had thought we had lost containment... we were lucky.  (this is called Antigenic Drift)  I am a bit more familiar with Antigenic Shift, where if you have multiple viruses in a host they can swap whole chains and change dramatically and quickly (i.e. Flu 1 virus and Flu 2 virus - which are different - swap large parts between them).  This is why we have new Flu on annualized basis that have to be dealt with.  We luckily have a very limited number of coronavirus that this can do it with and one has a couple of cases a year, one has been contained, and the other 4 are a minor nuisance right now.   MERS and SARS-CoV-1 are cousins though of SARS-CoV-2... and they have a 38% and 10% mortality rate respectively.   Animals have many more coronavirus so the SARS-CoV-2 -- which has jumped back to animals (cats, dogs, minks) could jump back to humans with new mutations (the Antigenic Shift type; most worried about the mink farms that had outbreaks). 

20 minutes ago, malthebluff said:

Then you didnt understand the context of a pandemic nowhere does it say that covid is flu it says get on with it like we did with Spanish flu 

Of course I know SARS-CoV-2 (causes COVID-19) is not a influenza virus (Type V virus along with measels, mumps, ebola), it is a coronavirus (Type IV virus along with polio virus, rhinovirus).  That said, I would not classify pandemics by what type of virus caused it.... two pandemics caused by two different viruses can have more in common than two pandemics caused by the same type of virus.  Spanish flu was more deadly (mortality rate, total dead) than the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, but less deadly than SARS-CoV-1 aka SARS (mortality rate, luckily not be total dead).  It is interesting though you can get Cold & Flu medicine (like Neo-citron) and colds are typically caused by rhinovirus which is  a type IV virus and flu is caused by influenza virus which is a type V virus.  We commonly refer to cold and flu season as well.  SARS-CoV-2 is also a neurotropic virus (i.e. can damage destroy nerves) which I do not believe any influenza virus is.

48 minutes ago, malthebluff said:

I didnt say it was flu not once anywhere so please read slower 

I read that very slowly, and I am pretty sure I see the word flu at the 6th word in ????

20 minutes ago, Golden Triangle said:

The more I see this smug git the more I want to smack him right between the eyes, preferably with a baseball bat ????????????

Go ahead, smack me... won't help though... arguing your point and doing research to point out my mistakes works much better...

35 minutes ago, tomacht8 said:

Where else but in the human body does the virus mutate?

The virus mutate in vaccinated and unvaccinated people. The virus is constantly mutating in its reproduction. The genome of RNA viruses changes about 1 million times faster than the human DNA genome. My objection was to the Pepsi2005 poster, who claimed that vaccinated people create the mutational pressure. 

 

For your last sentence I don't see it that way. As crazy as it is, the virus doesn't actually want to kill its host.

 

I agree with you that vaccinated people does not 'create mutational pressure'.  For the first, lets say 7 to 10 days a new virus invades a host - it basically has free rein to hijack cells which is then used to replicate more and more copies of itself.  Once your immune system learns how to fight and create the appropriate antibodies to fight the virus it starts doing effectively what a vaccine has taught your immune system to do much much earlier (and on a much smaller amount of invasive virus).   Less copying of the virus, less chance at creating a mutant copy of the virus.... and less chance of creating a mutant that is more resistant to the current antibodies.  Killing off the virus before it can create a beachhead, reduces the chances of creating more mutants.   RNA effectively does not have much error correcting, so if a bad copy is made ... it is made and not corrected.  Cell replication (DNA) replication - basically has error correction - and if there is an error it corrects it (in most cases), if it happens in a repair gene - that is when you get cancer cells - and if they are not killed (I believe by your immune system) and they replicate - you have a problem (lay persons understanding).   Every few generations of humans (during human replication ????) the Y-DNA will mutate (that is what is used to test if the blood is yours - or from a close relative), mDNA mutates less frequently.  I have a sample of my blood in one of the genealogy focused DNA test databases... so if there is a serial killer related to me... they are screwed when that is sent to the company and the company unwittingly adds them. 

6 minutes ago, sucit said:

Bro, malls are closed. People are not allowed to work. They have families. Your point about tourists not returning immediately is noted but it is moot. You can take away jobs from Thais I am not sure what to say if people do not understand this. 

I am not a big fan of closing malls or small shops, just enforcing strict mask wearing and distancing - along with regular testing of staff.   I am a fan of comprehensive testing/tracing/tracking... and more granular lock-downs when clusters are identified.  City-wide lock-downs should be a fallback when you fail in the areas of testing/tracing/tracking and more granular lock-downs.  Unfortunately I think they replicate other countries without taking into account where other countries fail (mostly in the area of tracing/tracking).

1 hour ago, Thaiophil said:

I guess the people weighing 99 kg will be ordering the family buckets at KFC.????

 

Surely not many Thais weigh 100kg

 

 

Just ordered lots of pizza, some burgers, some deserts....  ????

8 minutes ago, Imkah said:

No booster shots:  Although Thailand is a country in dire straits most of Africa are still up <deleted> creek without any paddles.  Western countries have hoarded, Thailand has not even tried without the Government first asking what is in it for us, which is a tragedy.  Covid will probably never go away but if we don't want to go through the whole Greek alphabet of mutations to this virus we have to slow the spreading world-wide.  It's actually a good lesson in how we all now are dependant on each other.  A lesson that should be well learned.  (It won't I know but what the heck). Could be useful for other minor problems like say global heating, draught, heat, floods, Bangkok and other major cities slowly sliding into oceans rising etc.  What I am trying to say is forget the booster shots for now!  Lets start with understanding that this is not over before the reste of the world is a wee bit safer. 

The greek alphabet are labels assigned to the variants of concern (and a few of interest), not all variants....  The virus will not be eradicated and there will be more mutations (it is not particularly fast mutating as far as viruses go)...  There have been at least 500+ mutations so far recorded, and many more not recorded because they lost out too early...  Hint, the entire alphabet will be used.... then they will start on the first of a new naming scheme like... Andromeda Variant ????

23 minutes ago, Anton9 said:

How many people are having their life destroyed by the lockdowns and overraction to this crisis in Thailand?

Covid related deaths are not the only factor to evaluate a country response.

Otherwise you can just lock people in their house forever, maybe you will get zero covid deaths that way.

Sweden has a much older population than Thailand and most deaths are elderly people.

Also,Thailand just started to experience the worst of the pandemic so the death count will keep rising.

Tourists would STILL not be here in any numbers... which has a knock on effect in other industries.

The hardest hit sectors are:

• Financial industry (many that are related to tourism industry that may have loans against homes or businesses are distressed loans). It is also dependent on the construction industry which is dependent on tourists (long or short-term).
• Real Estate and Construction would still be impacted from lack of demand and more distressed loans
• Entertainment in areas dependent on tourism would still be effected
• Hotels would still be mostly empty

Those are the primary industries impacted.  

Air routes worldwide have been slashed and those flights that are flying are flying with more empty seats even after the routes have been slashed.