Ketyo

If Thailand had a legitimate democratically elected government it could more easily have a sensible policy of testing at the borders and quarantining to try to get the economy going.

But since Prayut is an illegitimate userper who rigged the election he is scared to death of the slightest opening up in case things get out of his control and the people rebel against him. It wouldn't take much.

The democracies in Europe, Asia and the Americas can suffer far greater death tolls to try to get their economies going without fear of the population rioting. The governments there are so much more secure. Their political systems are far more stable.

The illegitimate authoritarian non-democracies like Thailand and China, where the people can't vote out the government are far more at risk from the people rebelling if COVID gets out of control.... or for any other reason for that matter. That's why they crack down on the slightest thing and overreact all the time. That's why Prayut is tanking the Thai economy. Because he is scared.

Do they need biometrics to nab the African drug dealers who sit outside Margharita Sunrise on the corner of Sukhumvit Soi 13 every night openly pushing drugs. Or the ones that sit outside Startbucks at the end of Pat Pong just opposite the police control box.

Why is he commanding the army to do all this stuff. As far as I know the army is for fighting wars with other countries, not for dealing with illegal immigrants inside the country. Isn't there a civilian department that is supposed to do that. Say, the department of immigration.

I think the mixed reaction is because there is a lot to like about Thailand like the people, culture, lifestyle.

But there is also a lot to despise. Like the way that the incompetent, backwards, authoritarian military authorities treat the people including the Thais and Farangs. Nobody wants to live under a military dictatorship. It can turn an otherwise enjoyable experience very sour.

The article is very long, but doesn't cover half the mistakes the UK government made.

- Allowing the Prime Minister to publicly shake hands with COVID patients and then nearly die from COVID, and several of the senior team running the crisis to catch it - his senior advisor Cummings, the Health Secretary and at least one senior medical officer

- Welcoming local transmission as a way to achieve herd immunity before realizing that 500,000 would die and the health service would be overwhelmed by doing so

- Telling people that large outside gatherings where people spend all day together were fine and that coronavirus could only spread indoors among intimate contacts
- Telling people that there was no point checking arrivals at airports because there were so much domestic transmission, and then discovering a lot of domestic transmission was seeded from imported cases

- Not stockpiling PPE or turning local manufacturers over to making PPE early on

- Insisting for months that there was only weak evidence that facemasks prevent transmission and allowing people to mingle on public transport, in workplaces, hospitals and in supermarkets in close proximity before eventually introducing a requirement to wear face masks only on public transport and in hospitals

- Asserting that there would be no transmission in care homes and they would be ring-fenced, and then emptying hospital beds of people into care homes without testing and seeding thousands more cases

- Allowing thousands of mainly elderly people to die in care homes instead of readmitting them to hospital even though there was over 50% of critical care capacity available most of the time

- As the article says, abandoning test, trace and isolate early on instead of growing local capacity slowly and steadily, and then introducing a centralised outsourced system of mainly unskilled private sector phone operators sitting in call centres miles from communities and with little knowledge of local conditions and separate from the community public health system

- Investing for months in a bespoke contact-tracing app that other countries knew could not work (and abandoned similar approaches) months earlier

Catastrophic incompetence 

From my understanding its the Christians and Muslims that want to ban the sex industry. And the reason for that is because they want people to spend more time praying under their control. Everybody else thinks that sex is a good thing.

With Coronavirus and Brexit the UK is so funny to watch. Great entertainment. A slow motion train crash that we can see in real life. Is there a more incompetent country in the world right now. Brazil maybe. But probably the UK is the worst. Right wing populists. Trump Bolsonaro and Boris. Follow the policies that uneducated and stupid people like and that's what you get. Self inflicted disasters.