placnx

1 hour ago, DrTuner said:

Isranews has an article about VISTEC and PTT having developed (together with Thai hospitals and MIT in USA) a quick SARS-CoV-2 test kit which costs about 15 USD/test and is apparently of the same type as the Japanese/Chinese kit, ie. one of those antibody tests where you <deleted> your finger and have the plastic tester with the red lines, like HIV test. It's in Thai so won't link but should appear on TVF soon. It's good news for normal people, nightmare for those that are trying to cover up the real numbers. 

I asked a top virologist & vaccine maker about the 15-minute IgM antibody test developed by Chinese and reported by Xinhua on 15 Feb. Virologist said that it would take around a week after infection for the antibody to show in the blood, but Chinese claimed that the antibody test was better than their nucleic acid RT-PCR. If Isranews article is opened in Chrome browser, maybe it can translate into English. Please post link.

https://www.msn.com/th-th/news/world/จีนพัฒนาชุดตรวจจับ-โควิด-19-ใหม่เห็นผลใน-15-นาที/ar-BB101PR7?ocid=spartanntp

10 hours ago, justin case said:

most people live in AIRCOOLED rooms = colder than 27 °C

 

at home, the car, the office, shopping malls, BTS, MRT, schools (non-gov), airports...

 

you only need one sick person at lower than 27 degrees to kill this "hot weather balloon"

 

think about thais and their precious WHITE SKIN will not allow themselves to absorb vitamin D from the  sun !!!!

 

 

the super polluted thai air does not help anybody's lungs and this disease attacks ... THE LUNGS .... should be a wake up call but will be missed by those in power

Air con = correct! Why didn't any of the experts think about this? One of the first Thai victims was a taxi driver who had Chinese customers. If we want to be safer in a taxi, turn off air con and open windows, but watch out for diesel fumes....

8 minutes ago, zydeco said:

The fools. All those billions and billions of buybacks at much higher prices all throughout 2017-2019. They deserve to be roasted. That's where all the 2017 tax cut money went, stock buybacks. And now they'll be wanting a bailout, because they took loans to buy back their own shares and get executive bonuses. Should put them all in a Thai prison.

True. These buybacks and the lending that supported them will kill those stocks. 

15 minutes ago, zydeco said:

And the end result will be what we just saw happen in Japan today, where the Bank of Japan is buying ETFs (they already own 75 percent of them), stocks, bonds, and negative interest rates. Trump is jealous. 

 

If the Fed could buy SPY and QQQ ETFs that could keep the market from finding a bottom for even longer!

22 hours ago, Cake Monster said:

I really dont know what if it was, but there was surely some kind of nasty Bug thing going around.

What I do know is that early in November both myself and my Wife contracted some kind of Chest Infection that was absolutely awful. Wracking Dry Cough, Nausea, Headaches just like the Flu, but worse

We both kept taking Antibiotics for most of November, and they had little effect upon the symptoms, and it was mid December before I felt anything like good again.

I do know that I dont want it ever again, as I felt the most sick for the longest period of time in my life

I got dry throat/cough on 7 January, two days after having a wisdom tooth out. It developed into viral bronchitis with classic symptoms and lasted 5 weeks. I'm now 76 and have never had flu in decades or that ever lasted so long. Pulmonologist in CM University Hospital kept insisting that it was caused by post-nasal drip, but I had no stuffy or runny nose throughout the 5 weeks. I keep wondering why he was so insistent on a fake diagnosis. Then he prescribed expensive inappropriate antibiotics which I didn't take. Also charged 500 Baht for a procedure that wasn't done!!!

23 hours ago, Nigel Garvie said:

In order to balance this I think you should take into account how much China is owed. Currently about 6% of world GDP, including 1 Trillion in US treasury bonds. I think there are more convincing clients for the countries in most trouble from the economic effects of the virus.

 

https://hbr.org/2020/02/how-much-money-does-the-world-owe-china 

Cash is getting scarce these days. The problem for China's debtor countries will come when they cannot pay, so China will take resources, port facilities, etc. China has large currency reserves, but that doesn't hold a candle to 325% of their GDP which was USD 14.4 tn in 2019.

4 hours ago, Eric Loh said:

Those countries that will survive this economic onslaught will be those who has low debts, high foreign reserves and enough of dry powder in their interest rate for eventualities. US, Europe (some) and Japan are extremely vulnerable to all these aspects. When the dust settle, we may see dollar collapse and lose its reserves currency status. I see a paradigm shift becoming real soon. 

China is reported to have debt of 325% of GDP, so it is also vulnerable, particularly since Xi Jin Ping has been suppressing grey market lending that supports small & medium businesses. It's reported elsewhere that 60% of small business cannot survive more than 2 months if the Chinese economy continues to experience blockages. This no doubt explains why the leadership is intent on portraying the Coronavirus epidemic as easing so people will return from the provinces to get back to work. For good reason many people do not believe government propaganda, so economic revival is not assured.

Did Carrie Lam ask for this? All the better to arrest those nuisances wearing masks!

3 hours ago, spidermike007 said:

Trump never met a dictator, despot, or evil person he did not like. MBS, Kim, Putin, Xi, the list goes on. I think he is envious of their power and wealth. Real wealth. Real power. 

The oil shock on top of Coronavirus makes a worldwide recession quite likely, and in that case Trump will probably be out next January. With oil stocks down as much as 50% yesterday, MBS will not be popular in the US oil & gas states - about 10 - and their reps & senators will join the list opposing Saudi Arabia, MBS in particular. Several votes were blocked only by Trump's veto.

So this suggestion in the story: "The second source with royal connections said the crown prince may have wanted to clear his path before the U.S. presidential election, fearing that a loss by Donald Trump could affect his standing." sounds quite plausible.

3 hours ago, Fore Man said:

I think your statistics regarding the 1918 Spanish Flu are incorrect...by a huge margin. That strain killed 40 to 50 million worldwide, six to seven times your estimate that 7 million could succumb to COVID-19, making it “the biggest killer on the planet” to date.

I would like to point out that Post #15 had a typo. 1% of 7 billion is 70,000,000, so such a number of fatalities would indeed be greater than the 1918-19 Spanish Flu (which BTW originated in China). While it is to be hoped that 1% fatalities do not occur in developed countries or Thailand, many specialists are warning that the pandemic will be disastrous in countries with poor medical care. There 1% would likely be an optimistic figure as medical facilities would soon be overwhelmed.

19 hours ago, Ventenio said:

I hope someone sues the WHO.  For zillions.  They knew it was super dangerous, acted negligently, and you traveled to a place where they KNEW it was unsafe to travel to.....  i know, not likely.

Most likely WHO is IMMUNE from a lawsuit, just like the UN peacekeepers from Nepal who spread cholera widely in Haiti.

2 hours ago, AussieBob18 said:

The Wuhan Virus - that is its real name. Like the Hong Kong flu virus.  SARS is the Guangdong Virus.  Middle East Respiratory Syndrome is othgerwise known as MERS.  

Why not call it WERS?

9 hours ago, webfact said:

Beijing last week revoked the credentials of three Wall Street Journal correspondents over a column China said was racist. The United States has said it was considering a range of responses to their expulsion.

Maybe the real reason for the expulsion was that one of them reported on the activities of Xi's relative in Australia, plus the recent classification of Xinhua people is the US as foreign agents. Perhaps US could expel Xinhua, People's Daily proportionately, so that since China has four times the population, US expels 12 Xinhua operatives!

4 hours ago, Max69xl said:

You have to use a bank account the way it's supposed to be used. If having 2-3 transactions a month,then there is not much to combine. If you use your account for monthly living expenses, pay rent online,pay monthly bills/subscriptions online,top up the phone online,buy stuff online, withdraw money from ATM's, monthly deposits + transfers, then, if you don't update your bank book,the second month it will have so called combined transactions. You and many other posters with just a very few transactions, don't have a clue how it works. If you pay your bills at Big C ,top up your phone at 7/11,never buy anything online, how do you think you'll get any transactions? 

At SCB the statement gives all transactions, even when the passbook update only shows a monthly summary entry.

4 hours ago, rudi49jr said:

Never going to happen. First of all, the Chinese will eat anything that lives and moves, and they will eat just about every part of it. They have done so for thousands of years and I don't see them stop doing that any time soon. Secondly, Chinese medicine also uses bits and pieces of almost every animal, and has been doing that for thousands of years as well. Even less chance of that going to stop any time soon.

True. The only way is through education from kindergarten! Millennia of evasion of draconian laws means that more laws won't make any difference. Education is not easy since the schools in western China outside of major cities are primitive, so it's difficult for reason to have any impact on primeval beliefs in such schools.

On 2/24/2020 at 10:07 AM, ubonjoe said:

What is the day your existing extension ended. If after March 1st last year they wanted that to prove you kept the 800k baht in the bank for 3 months and then had at least 400k baht there for the rest of the year.

Please clarify whether the 3 months for retaining 800,000 Baht applies from the date of the extension or the date of expiry of permission to stay. Thanks.

14 hours ago, Ian223 said:

Was just reading this study which uses a statistical analysis for case predictions based on air travel from Wuhan. The authors come to the conclusion that Thailand and Indonesia may have higher than reported cases.

 

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.04.20020495v2.full.pdf+html

 

And also came across this study, estimating COVID19 import risk by country using modeling based on air travel:

 

http://rocs.hu-berlin.de/corona/

 

Interesting to see data driven studies coming to a conclusion that many people are suspecting. 

 

That being said, I truly hope Thailand’s lower than predicted cases are genuine. Fingers crossed. 

The Berlin paper is impressive and useful. For economic reasons, i.e. very few passengers, a lot of airlines will suspend flights. They will only keep flying if ordered to do so. After Corona has a high number of cases in the developed world, there will not be any further need to stop flights from airports close to the origin of WERS a/k/a COVID-19! By that time poor countries will presumably have burned out, in that enough people will have been infected for survivors to have herd immunity.

Infection of sub-Saharan Africa by some of the million Chinese already there will possibly leave a reservoir to infect the rest of the Southern Hemisphere while the Northern is in recovery mode with warmer weather. Hopefully no virulent mutations will come out of this.

By that time let's hope that several vaccine candidates are available to try on health care workers, and that later these vaccines are of a kind that can be scaled up to protect populations, should this virus become a part of the landscape. 

1 hour ago, bristolboy said:

If you mean by that once a patient is symptomatic you have a point. But if you mean that there is no cure for someone bitten by an rabid animal, that is not the case. If a victim is given an injection of rabies immunoglobulin and the vaccine before symptoms appear, there is virtually a 100% recovery rate.

Use of blood from recovered Ebola patients was said to be effective, but I believe that they were symptomatic, and not just persons who had been in contact with patients.

23 minutes ago, christophe75 said:

I would like to demonstrate the "double-speak" of China, and its duplicity.
A few posts behind, I copy-pasted a headline from

 

Global Times, a chinese media in english.

An official one.

"is a daily tabloid newspaper under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Party's People's Daily newspaper"

 

Can you find something more official, hum ? And more censored ?

"ban of private cars in Hubei province".

 

That was february 16.

And considering that Hubei province = 58 millions of people, that was a huge news. A tremendous news, right ?

 

Guess what ?
 

They have erased it !

 

Check by yourself :

 

https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1177737.shtml

 

There is still the ban in Wuhan city (january 25), but the one in Hubei province... simply gone.

 

And even better.. you can still find the tweet from Global Times !

 

I guess the intern didn't do his job properly. ????

 

https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/1228953604121219076

 

Voila. A proof (someone was asking for proof).

 

China didn't change. Doesn't change. They're lying, cheating, and lying again.

 

It's the DNA of the regime since 1949.

This lying is a cultural phenomenon, probably from thousands of years of authoritarian regimes in China. People have to survive in a pyramidal social structure with draconian punishments awaiting violators of repressive "laws", the age-old rule by law. Lying in various forms is necessary to claw one's way to a level where one can survive WERS a/k/a COVID-19 or evade whatever edict will kill off those who lack the wits to successfully dissemble.

3 hours ago, Tayaout said:

Today, I went to Myanmar via land border. They asked to declare if I went to China in the last month, they checked my temperature and they were all wearing N95 mask. 

 

On my way back to Thailand: nothing! 

Thailand bordering Burma could be more dangerous than current flights from China. What's going to happen in Burma when WERS a/k/a COVID-19 spreads around? Impressions from a 2-week trip there in 2012 are that the health care system would be quickly overwhelmed, and zombies will overrun the border!!

2 hours ago, Pedrogaz said:

Reading the comments here I see there is a lot of confusion about coronavirus testing. First there are not billions of test kits hanging around in warehouses waiting for someone to pick them up. Testing is very slow indeed...notice that less than a 1000 on the Yokohama ship have been tested. Third the PCR methodology that is used has a given sensitivity....ie if you have 2 virus particles in the sample it may fail to detect....but if you have 20, it may detect them....ie there are lots of false negatives.

Fourth, the samples are not uniform and like with biopsies for cancer you need multiple samples from patients....plus samples from sputum are very difficult to analyze. 

Given all this, countries, especially China, have done well with limited resources and hardware. They obviously can't screen everyone at the drop of a hat, so so must prioritize ie give priority to people with symptoms, elderly, immune deficient etc.

Lastly, the standards are changing as people come to grips with this new plague. Testing via PCR will get much more sensitive with time.....if you look at Hep C, when the PCR test first came out in 1988 you needed some 1 million visions per sample to get a positive result, 50 years later it was down to about 50 virions. 

 

BBC has a useful piece about the pitfalls of testing

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51491763

The poor now dead doctor in Wuhan had, was it six, negative tests before a positive one. By then he was too sick to be saved.

Could there be a 15-minute test using newer technology, something that could be used for screening before boarding aircraft? It could help slow the spread and allow more time to increase production of antivirals, perhaps have a candidate vaccine to administer to health workers on a stopgap basis. While this is not like Ebola, the huge number of cases coming our way means that even a small percentage becoming mortalities could be economically & politically destructive.

2 hours ago, Pedrogaz said:

The world is coming to an end. The lack of spread to non Asian countries looks odd...why so few cases is Europe and Africa . A report on biowarfare was published today in the US (they have 148 biowarfare research centers apparently) which mentions viruses constructed to target certain ethnicities. Makes one wonder.

Concerning 146 "biowarfare research centers", are you referring to China or the US? Please give us all the link to this report.

7 hours ago, khunjeff said:

Agreed. Tax treaties prevent double taxation on the same income - they don't exempt you from paying US tax on income that is normally taxable. In the situation described, US tax would be payable in the year the income was received, but no Thai tax would be due when the funds were transferred to Thailand. 

If you have income in the year in which you transfer funds to Thailand, I believe that you have to count transferred funds as "income" for Thai tax up to the amount of your income in that year. There could be some adjustments, though.