cormanr7

Lots of confusing information here. There are a few airlines that include hold bagage (usually up to 10-15 kg) even in their cheapest tickets. These are (were) Nok, Thai Smile and Thai Lionair. The other two major 'budget' airlines, Thai AirAsia and ThaiVietjet air do NOT (though they have more expensive options that do). Here you can purchase hold bagage in increments, usually cheaper if you do this at the time of booking, fares at the airport can be steep.

Regarding cabin luggage, the max 7 kg limit or thereabouts has officially been in force (not just in Thailand) for many years. This has to do with the overhead bins which are not designed for heavy stuff. However, the number of cabin luggage differs per airline, some are trying to limit it to one piece, for others you can take a small bag + a computer. In addition their is usually a size limit.

       I have never heard of hold luggage not being allowed on a flight (except for very small commuter planes), either this was a special case or a misunderstanding: basic AirAsia tickets do NOT include hold luggage. They only fly A320/A321 so space should not be a problem but many airports in the west have a shortage of personal (people made redundant) might be the same here?

Getting to the bicycle: note that not just the weight but also the dimensions are critical. Suppose you had something that only weighed 15 kg but had outsize dimensions, it will be refused. At AirAsia you can book up to 40 kg hold bagage; if you tick sports equipment, it can also include a bicycle but you will probably have to pack it per their instructions (usually pedals removed, ....) so that it is flat. Cost (via prebooking) for 40 kg is 1,400 B (you can check this by selecting a flight, then going to add-ons, no need to actually book it). Not sure if they will go over this weight.

     Alternative, put the bicycle on a train; a few days ago I was at BangSue Junction and I saw them hustling some motorcycles in the cargo carriage of a train. 

On 11/14/2021 at 7:00 PM, fdsa said:

- welcome to Shopee! (note that I'm not saying "Lazada" because it's the same shíthole as Aliexpress - same owner, same codebase, same broken search engine)

they have greatly enhanced their logistics so I usually get shipments from China in ~10 days.

No experience with lazada/Aliexpress but bought a few items on Shopee that came from China, either local Thai sellers did not have the product or -in the case of an airbrush- the same item from China was more than 50% cheaper than from the local sellers. Surprisingly I received the items (from two sellers) in 10-12 days. The items seem to go to a warehouse/clearing house in Thailand and are then shipped via the usual local couriers (Shopee Express. J&T, Ninjavan,.....). No problems with customs (note that these were not very valuable items, all <1,000 Baht).  Tracking is available, right from the moment of pick-up in China. Most items seem to go via Shanghai.

According to some reports, It seems risky to apply just 7 days prior to departure to Thailand, especially if you have some obscure vacc. certificate. That begs the question: how long before departure can you apply for the Thailand Pass. Did anyone try say 4 weeks before departure? Is there an official time period in which you can apply?

20 hours ago, Lemsta69 said:

QR codes for the vax certificate.

Did you have separate QR codes for the first and second vaccination?

I got my vaccinations in Bangkok and there is only one QR code (on the final certificate that shows both vaccinations). In fact I have not seen anyone around here with a QR code for the first shot and as far as I am aware this is quite rare abroad too. So what do people use then for the first and second vaccinations in the Thailand Pass application? Do you use the single QR code twice?

When trying to get an intl. vaccine certificate on the mophrom app, I got as far as the 'booking date' (I assume this refers to the date you pick it up or is it the date of submission?) but when I click this I get a calender (Nov/Dec) which does not populate the field. No luck either with trying to fill in a date manually (with either 2021 or 2564). When I get to the confirm step, there is a pop-up saying 'fill in booking date'. Any ideas? 

As far as I am aware, there is no PCR test on arrival at Suvanabhumi, you will be taken either a) directly to the hotel where a nurse will take the sample or b) to a test center and then to your hotel . Transport will be arranged by the hotel.

A number of hotels approved for the 'test&go' one night scheme are shown here: https://ASQ.in.th/1DAY. The price should include the PCR test and transport. I think the results of the PCR will be reported by e-mail.

Apparently if you test positive, you will be taken to a hospital 'for further tests'. Most of this info. was taken from Richard Barrow's site.

Here is some information https://asq.in.th/thailand-covid-insurance (updated October 24th 2021), you can fill in your age and period of stay and see prices from various insurers (it states at the top that insurance must cover 'travel and COVID-19' whatever that means). Note that this is only a limited selection, you could probably find others. If you are 65 and are looking for a 180 day period (just an an example) it appears that AXA and Tune are cheapest and furthermore also cover asymptotic covid cases. However, Tune actually covers one year, but it appears that the price (15,000 Baht) is similar to the previous policy that covered 100,000 USD and indeed when clicking the link you are directed to the 'old' page. Not sure whether these policies will be priced cheaper in the future due to the 50K requirement for the Thai Pass.

10 hours ago, ProbPossConf said:

Could not do the report online when the dreaded pop-up advised to visit the local immigration office

Same here, but this for CW this morning. On-line worked for me for a year, but last time (August) had to go in person (I thought that this was due to the new extension of stay date not having been entered in the system?).

So waste 3-4 hours next week.

On 10/12/2021 at 4:18 PM, Eaglekott said:

Maybe because many low risk countries has many more cases per day and capita than Thailand. Today Thailand had about 10,000 new cases with 70M people and UK had 49,500 cases on their 69M people. 

Meaningless comparison as the UK has something like 420,000 PCR tests/day (plus further ATK) https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/testing whereas in Thailand it is 56,000 on a good day (plus further ATK) https://www3.dmsc.moph.go.th/# for a roughly similar number of people.

IF you, for instance, take KLM to Amsterdam and check the travel requirements (on the KLM website click on COVID 19 which will direct you to a site called  https://klm.traveldoc.aero) for your flight from BKK. It then shows that you need either a PCR test no longer than 48h OR an antigen test no longer than 24h before flight departure. This is in line with the official Dutch Govt entry regulations.

BKK-AMS:

Covid-19 Test Required: Passengers aged 12 years and older travelling from a high-risk or very high-risk area outside the EU/Schengen area must hold one of the following:

• A negative NAAT test (PCR, RT PCR, LAMP, TMA and mPOCT) result conducted up to 48 hours before boarding; or
• A negative antigen test result conducted up to 24 hours before boarding.

Be careful of what you read on this forum and check with the airline yourself.

Nice graph of cases vs time in the 13 health districts (grouping of provinces according to location with Bangkok as a separate district). In most districts (reported) cases have declined significantly, but in district 6 (which includes a number of 'major' cities such as Chasoensao, Chonburi and Pattaya) cases remain consistently high. Bucking the trend is district 12, made up of the southern provinces, where cases have been increasing steadily as widely reported. In the lower part of the fig. it is evident that districts 6 and 12 combined make up almost half of the new cases. What is missing is a case load per capita for the various districts. Source is shown at the top of the fig. 

There seems to be an issue with some airlines flying to Europe apparently requiring a PCR test here in Bangkok before departure whereas for many EU countries the government rules clearly state that either a PCR OR an antigen test is required. Though the latter must usually be taken closer to departure it is more convenient (and cheaper) as you can have it done within an hour and walk away with a certificate whereas the results of the PCR test take time (and are usually forwarded by e-mail). If you want to have results in a few hours there are a few options (but sometimes at a highly inflated cost).

As examples, the official govt. site for the Netherlands and Germany state:

• Netherlands: https://www.government.nl/topics/coronavirus-covid-19/visiting-the-netherlands-from-abroad/mandatory-negative-test-results-and-declaration/information-on-the-test-result     
• Type of test: 
  • The test used for a NAAT (PCR) test result  must be a molecular NAAT (PCR) test (either PCR, RT PCR, LAMP, TMA or mPOCT). For a rapid test result the test must be a rapid test conducted up to 24 hours before departure. Usually this is an antigen test but it can also be a NAAT (PCR) test.
•  
• Germany: https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/en/coronavirus/2317268

• A negative test result obtained using nucleic acid amplification technology (e.g. PCR, PoC- PCR) in German, English, French, Italian or Spanish. The test must have been carried out no more than 72 hours prior to entry (time of swabbing).

  Alternatively, a negative antigen rapid test result in German, English, French, Italian or Spanish. Following a stay in a high-risk area, the test must have been carried out no more than 48 hours prior to entry. Following a stay in an area of variant of concern, the test must have been carried out no more than 24 hours prior to entry

Moving to the KLM site, for a BKK-AMS flight it says (https://klm.traveldoc.aero/results):

Covid-19 Test Required: Passengers aged 12 years and older travelling from a high-risk or very high-risk area outside the EU/Schengen area must hold one of the following:

• A negative NAAT test (PCR, RT PCR, LAMP, TMA and mPOCT) result conducted up to 48 hours before boarding; or
• A negative antigen test result conducted up to 24 hours before boarding.

So a PCR test is not always required, but check first with your airline.

So lots of people want to know what the number of tests/day is.  A bit of research leads to https://github.com/djay/covidthailand#testing where we find the PCR tests/day. These in turn come from https://www3.dmsc.moph.go.th. So for the last two weeks (data updated to Oct. 2^nd) we get the following (see table). More interesting data on the latter site with details of the accredited labs for COVID PCR-tests (now more than 350 though on some days they manage less than 30,000 tests !). Now the fun starts: the number of positive tests is a lot lower than the officially reported  number of confirmed cases. This trend started roughly mid July and early September the number of positives was some 33% lower than the confirmed cases (see figs). The github site has a few pages on the possible reasons for the discrepancy which you can read yourself but there is no clear answer. I did note that some of the accredited hospitals potentially use pooled samples which in theory allow detection of more than one case per PCR test. 

Looking at the table another unexpected observation: the number of tests/day varies by a factor of almost two, yet the positive rate is in a narrow range (15-18%). Unfortunately there seems to be little explanation on the moph site what the data actually represent it is just given as 'date/positive/tests'.

There are loads of other data on the github site.

On 4/6/2021 at 1:39 PM, Fab5BKK said:

The new "A" series from Samsung surely worth a look, a little bit over the budget but there are some promotions around...

Just bought a Galaxy A22 4G (5,600 Baht after discounts, 'officially' 7,000 Baht). First appeared around July, works great. They apparently only sell the model with the highest specs (6/128 GB) here in Thailand.

Actually AirAsia is supposed to start Hua Hin to Chiang Mai twice weekly from Oct. 15

https://www.traveldailymedia.com/airasia-to-launch-hua-hin-chiang-mai-route-on-15-oct/

The following figures should be interesting (actually there is nothing new to be seen here, but people doggedly continue to show graphs of cases only). They show confirmed cases (PCR only), deaths and vaccination rate for (from to to bottom) Thailand, Indonesia, Germany and UK. I have chosen Indonesia because it has an even lower testing regime than Thailand (see ourworldindata.com), has relatively low vaccination coverage and uses Sinovac and AZ to a large extent.  Germany and UK are two examples of countries with extensive testing and high vaccination coverage. Data are from https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps which to some extent is more useful than worldometer and the like. For Thailand I have also included the hard data (the 2nd fig) from the same source.

Graphs of deaths closely follow those of cases with a 1-3 week interval. The death rate often decreases a bit faster than the case rate. This may be due to vaccination but in the case of the UK it also happened during the end 2020/early 2021 wave when few vaccinations had been performed. There can be many reasons: enhanced testing may detect more asymptotic cases (which will often not result in death), people may report to a hospital earlier after cases shoot up, etc. With high vaccination coverage, the case fatality rate (CFR) decreases drastically and the death curves tend to be much more flat.

Morale: comparing cases vs deaths is useful; if the curves look completely different there is potentially something wrong (example: cases go down rapidly but deaths stay at a plateau for a long time. Is it still possible to fake data even when death viz case curves look OK. Of course, people who do that are well aware of what I have written in the preceding two paragraphs. You could just scale the 'true' data, for instance by dividing them by two or whatever. In the end, the excess deaths should give some crude indication whether the death numbers are realistic. In August, for instance, excess deaths in Thailand were more than twice as high as reported deaths with COVID (cannot find the reference at the moment).

Then there is the 'thailand has a low testing rate so that is one of the reasons it is still on the UK red list' crowd. Well, for instance Bangladesh and Pakistan were taking off the red list though their testing rates (per capita) are 3-4 fold lower than in Thailand (data from ourworldindata.com). The testing rate is only meaningful when it is related to the positive rate and these were less than 5% for Bangladesh and Pakistan and much higher for Thailand (ourworldindata.com). There are probably also political factors, i.e. there are lots of East Asians in the UK. Of course, Thailand could bring the positive rate down by testing more but this would also increase the case count/capita, which is another factor (and again these were low for Bangladesh/Pakistan). It would help to control the spread of the virus.  

Thailand

Indonesia

Germany

UK

15 minutes ago, Espanol said:

In Bangkok now no sandbox. Only ASQ hotel quarantine. 

You must stay in your room 14 days.

Yes, I am aware of that but that is not what I meant. If Bangkok 'opens up' on Nov. 1st or whenever what will be the boundary then?

On 9/16/2021 at 2:42 PM, DFPhuket said:

You only have to stay in the hotel for a few hours after arrival pending the airport PCR test. After that you are free to go where you'd like. . 

So where is the boundary then? At Phuket that is clear but in Bangkok?

4 hours ago, dinsdale said:

Just been watching Campbell giving some details of ATK or rapid antigen tests or lateral flow tests. New data from UK govt says specificity is 99.9% but maybe 99.97% of a positive reading being correct. So that's a 0.03% chance of a false positive. This being the case why are ATK positives here treated seperately and not included in daily infection numbers as a whole? I've been saying for a while that false negatives are a problem because people use these things get a negative reading and think they don't have the virus and then obviously can spread it. Data on false negatives is if symptomatic there's a 28% chance of a false negative and non-symptomatic a 42% chance of a false negative. 

Quoting a Youtube video is not very useful as a reference. Here is a real life study of a well known antigen test from Abbott: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7799021/. It concludes that the specificity is 99.9% (with a very narrow confidence interval) but sensitivity is only 93.3% (with a very wide confidence interval). In other words, it is difficult to detect low viral loads with antigen test kits. The CDC has a report on the use of antigen kits https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/lab/resources/antigen-tests-guidelines.html and various pro- and contras. 

6 minutes ago, BestB said:

.

 

Australian and Korean made AZ was also not accepted in UK

 

 

The issue of AZ produced in Thailand not being accepted goes far further than the UK. It applies also to the EU so will affect quite a lot of people here in Thailand (and other countries that have received locally produced AZ). It must be registered at the EMA as 'vaxzevria' . However, unlike the claim above for AZ produced in AUS and South Korea (as well as Japan), these are on the list of non-EU produced AZ accepted in the EU. This from the official Dutch Govt. site (these rules also apply to all other EU countries, though they can decide to go their own way).  https://www.government.nl/topics/c/coronavirus-covid-19/visiting-the-netherlands-from-abroad/requirements-for-proof-of-vaccination. 

Why Siam Bioscience has not registered AZ at the EMA is obscure, the example of South Korea shows that it is clearly achievable.   

Further note: France has a system whereby visitors from outside the EU (including those from USA/Canada) can apply for a QR code which is equivalent to the EU DCC (digital heath pass) before they depart for France https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/How-tourists-can-get-a-Covid-vaccine-QR-code-recognised-in-France, https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/coming-to-france/coronavirus-advice-for-foreign-nationals-in-france/coronavirus-statements/article/applying-for-a-covid-certificate-if-you-were-vaccinated-abroad-procedure-for. For this you have to submit various documents, including your foreign health pass/certificate/passport online.

However, even if you can get a second AZ shot, such an application will likely be declined for reasons outlined in my previous post. However, it certainly does not hurt to try this. 

If you manage to go to France, I would suspect that you have to quarantine upon return here. I doubt whether the Bangkok sandbox (if and when it starts) will be very different from Phuket with respect to quarantine and tests (maybe less, or some PCR replaced with ATK?). 

I would strongly urge you to call your embassy in Bangkok and check whether the Thai AZ vaccine certificate (or the yellow passport, both with two AZ shots) is valid in your country. Officially it is NOT (applies to the whole EU) as Siam Bioscience has apparently not registered their product with the EMA. I checked with the Dutch embassy (few weeks ago) and they said NO, not valid. I have read similar comments on the forum here for Spain and Greece.

Also note the following restrictions within France (https://www.gouvernement.fr/en/coronavirus-covid-19)

HEALTH PASS    You must present a health pass to access leisure and culture venues and events bringing together more than 50 people.
From early August, you will also need to present a pass in bars, restaurants, malls, hospitals (except if you are admitted for urgent care), retirement homes, residential care homes, and for long-distance travel by plane, train or coach. For campsites, and other holiday accommodation you will need to present a pass once, on arrival.

In a few years Thailand  will be  -in essence- a Chinese province, just like Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar.

On 9/13/2021 at 5:24 PM, CartagenaWarlock said:

The situation is the same for Serum Institute produced Covishield (AZ licensed producer) which is neither approved by EU or Britain.

Nonsense, Covishield is accepted in the EU, see this Dutch government lists which applies to all EU countries (they can make their own rules though) 

https://www.government.nl/topics/coronavirus-covid-19/visiting-the-netherlands-from-abroad/requirements-for-proof-of-vaccination, the look for approved vaccines:

A further separate story on Covishield in Europe can be found here: https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/eu-travel-covishield-sinopharm-sinovac-vaccines-are-most-widely-accepted-by-eu-countries-after-those-authorised-by-ema/

31 minutes ago, Thaifly88 said:

This is incorrect, the app only accepts the 13 digit ID which is given to you after your second dose - 

No it accepts the 13 digit ID given on the 'next appointment' slip after the first dose. The app will install, show data for your first shot and also show details of your next appointment.  That is how I (and many others) found out that my second shot had been advanced one week (never received mail or SMS). I am not sure how fast data are uploaded to the app, but in the case of my second shot, I checked after ca 24h and it was all there.