DrDave

I would suggest getting a quote for the basic shell of the house. This would be the foundation, concrete floor, external and internal walls, roof, interior ceilings, windows, plumbing and electrical rough-ins. Doing this eliminates any variances in cost due to included finishing materials which you may, or may not like in a full quote. You are then free to select the finish materials based upon your taste and budget. These would include floor and wall tiles, electrical switches/outlets, lighting, plumbing fixtures, kitchen cabinets, interior doors, etc. The trim work remaining after the shell build could be a DIY project, or the labor could be easily contracted out locally.

I'm going to miss the sound of arc-induced humming and the smell of ozone in the air.

Not only do they have a special calculator, but it appears that they also have a TAT time machine: The Phuket Sandbox Travel Virtual Trade Meet 2021 was held in subsequent to the one-day Phuket Sandbox Travel 2021 online seminar on 30 September, 2021.

I'm surprised that both Etihad and Emerates are flying direct from Phuket to the UAE, with 650 seats between them. I wonder if CAAT would allow them to do a sealed UAE-HKT-BKK-UAE loop instead of separate HKT-UAE and BKK-UAE routes.

According to today's statistics listed on the TAT news website, 521 international passengers arrived at HKT on September 2. This is across 6 flights with a total seating capacity of 1,459. That's a passenger load of only 36%, and no airline will sustain that kind of loss for any length of time. This in combination with what appears to be a declining rate of booked SHA+ room-nights doesn't bode well for the program under the existing rules and regulations.

Yes, and those people coming to Phuket seeking jobs were no doubt spurred on by TAT's overly optimistic projections for the number of tourist arrivals.

Yes, the average number of booked nights in Phuket was 11. In the first 6 weeks of the sandbox, there was about 20,000 arrivals. I suspect a good percentage were returning expats and Thais, although there doesn't seem to be a way of knowing for sure. Going forward, I would think that more of the arrivals will be tourists as most of the expats and Thais would have already returned during the early part of the program. It'll be interesting to see if the number of arrivals in the last 6 weeks of the program keep pace with the first 6 weeks, which would likely indicate more tourists.

While this was true with the initial variants, the mRNA vaccines don't provide the same reduction in the level of virus loading for the Delta variant. The vaccines continue to offer protection against serious illness, however vaccinated individuals who are/become infected are showing the same level of Delta infection as those who are unvaccinated. The newest study (about 1 week ago) by Oxford University concludes the following: With Delta, infections occurring following two vaccinations had similar peak viral burden to those in unvaccinated individuals. SARS-CoV-2 vaccination still reduces new infections, but effectiveness and attenuation of peak viral burden are reduced with Delta. The good news is that even with the Delta variant, the mRNA vaccines continue to offer significant protection against serious illness and hospitalization, as well as a limited degree of protection against infection. The bad news is that vaccinated infected individuals have a higher probability of transmitting the Delta variant as compared to the previous strains. We're not out of the woods yet. https://www.ndm.ox.ac.uk/files/coronavirus/covid-19-infection-survey/finalfinalcombinedve20210816.pdf https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vaccine-delta-variant-infections-carry-same-virus-load-unvaccinated/

Yes, going forward and looking to the future, the number of "cases" will become less relevant compared to actual hospitalizations and deaths. While vaccines don't completely block the transmission of the virus from one person to the next, they are very effective at preventing serious illness and death, which makes focusing on hospitalizations and deaths preferable to tracking "cases". Without a weapon to eliminate transmission, this virus will be with us for a very long time. A recent study at Oxford University has found that current vaccines are less than 50% effective in blocking the transmission of the Delta variant, and the effectiveness in blocking any future variants is obviously unknown. A similar virus (in terms of constantly evolving variants) is influenza. In the US, the CDC estimated 61,000 deaths during the 2017/2018 flu season, (about .02% of the population), and 800,000 hospitalizations (about .25% of the population). Currently, there have been 630,000 Covid-19 deaths in the US, or about 10 times the number of influenza deaths in a single season. No testing or tracking of influenza "cases" is performed.

On a VIP bus (which incidentally costs about 1,000 baht HKT<->BKK) the driver sits in a semi-enclosed space, isolated from the passengers. I think even the normal buses are setup similar to this, so I would say it would be fairly safe.

Yes, this is correct for returning Thais under the sandbox program. They are not treated any differently than foreigners. However, I think smedly was referring to non-sandbox Thais who don't undergo the 3 tests required of sandboxers and if vaccinated, most likely with a vaccine most consider inferior. I think his point was that non-sandbox Thais are free to leave at any time, while the more-tested, better vaccinated sandboxers (both foreign and Thai) are not, which seems to be illogical.

Assuming a cost of 3,000 baht for a PCR test, the total for 3 tests would be 9,000 baht. Over 11 days, this is 820 baht/day or 7% of implied daily spend. As for revenues generated from a forced ALQ stay, these people won't be spending money on anything other than their ALQ room and maybe a little extra food, but nowhere near the implied daily spend.

The sum of the arrivals by country in the OP. The actual number is a little higher, as these are only the top 10 countries - however the number of arrivals from any other country would be less than 300 each. So lets err on the side of overstating arrivals for the month of July and assume 15,000. The daily spend per arrival would then be 11,500 baht (360USD). For a couple it would be 23,000 baht (720 USD)/day and 46,000 baht (1,400 USD) per day for a family of 4. Still ridiculous numbers. Even using the implied number of 21,000 arrivals (57 infections / .27% of arrivals as stated in the OP), the numbers are 8,200 single, 16,400 couple and 32,800 baht per day. I think it would be difficult for most tourists (especially couples and families) to spend consistently at this daily level considering nearly all entertainment venues have been closed. I find it hard to believe that when using the implied arrival figure of 21,000 over 7,500 of these arrivals (36%) came from countries other than the top 10. That would imply 300 arrivals from an additional 25 countries each. However we know that these arrival numbers would taper off as we work down through the list of countries, so there would have to be considerably more than 25 additional countries.

I think those number were pulled from somewhere other than a hat. 1.9 billion baht / 13,321 arrivals / 11 day average stay = approximately 13,000 baht/day. (or about 400 USD, and 209 GBP per day) for each and every arrival. Backing out 1,000 baht/day for the SHA+ hotel, that leaves 12,000 baht/day for a single traveler, which seems awfully high especially at this time. Now, considering each member of a family is counted as an arrival, that implies that a family of 4 would be spending a whopping 52,000 baht per day in order to achieve the 1.9 billion total spend they're claiming.