ukrules

Almost nobody cares what the UK government thinks, I know I don't - I generally regard them as complete morons, doesn't matter which party is in charge, it's all the same. However, you're very wrong here. You should take a vaccine to protect yourself from disease, not to satisfy some central bureaucracy run by buffoons. I believe you are better off with 2 Modernas, Pfizers or indeed AstraZenecas compared to some cocktail of Sinovac and one other. Personally I think I'm going to wait for next generation vaccines to come along that target this Delta and other variants to come. There's a lot of second generation vaccines coming through the multi phase testing pipeline right now.

Well they've just stolen the hackers 'bragging rights' here by accusing them of lying. I've seen what happens in the past when this situation presents itself - tens of GB of data usually ends up being published.

Rarely have I seen such ignorance, even on here.

Exactly, the entire process is completely pointless.

How dare you accuse me of not understanding sarcasm ????

Or go to one of the other countries which don't have such restrictions. I'm seeing people on facebook from back in the UK flying off to all sorts of places, just today one of my exes went to Greece. I believe she also went over to the Caribbean at least a couple of times since the pandemic began. No nonsense in those places.

In that case Thailand will never return to 'normal'...one day they will give up on all this nonsense, I doubt it will be any time soon.

You don't seem to be getting it, that is my point exactly. Nothing is going to stop it and it's already in Thailand so why are they trying to keep it out at such great cost? It's already here COVID is everywhere in Thailand - there's no need to pretend to keep it out - it's already in, attempting to keep it out when it's already in is just plain stupid.

Under your little plan above you doom the country on a permanent basis. There will never be 'home quarantine' - it will always involve some convoluted system of state control right down to when you can open your specially supervised by the military hotel door room. If the currently available vaccines are going to be accepted as in any way useful then there's no need to test vaccinated travelers, no need to quarantine them or anything else, just let them in and leave them alone. Until that happens the vast majority of people will simply go somewhere else. For most people their only requirement is warm weather during the the winter months and there's a lot of places within 10 hours flying time from Europe that provide that, those who remove any quarantine requirements will be the winners and people have long memories once they go somewhere new and like it.

November 1st is the new October 1st....for a while... From journalist Kulsawek Sawekwannakorn

Yet here we are just a week later :

Well, well, well it didn't take many days for this situation to turn around did it? Literally 1 week.....

They threatened criminal penalties for what's essentially a civil matter. The correct course of action to take when someone doesn't pay something or defaults from a payment plan is civil litigation. What I think we're missing here is the timeline - how long did this play out over? I suspect it's something that played out over a period of months.

It sounded like he agreed to a payment plan but they kept his passport illegally as security. When he needed to 'renew his visa' / extend his permission to stay shortly after they would not give him his passport back until he'd paid in full as if it was some sort of collateral. Am I viewing this incorrectly?

Dream on, nothing's opening any time soon.

This is one of the many reasons why Thailand has so few COVID cases, because they're hiding. I know Thais who have done this

This is the important part of this story. Thai people are isolating at home, why wasn't he allowed to do so?

What I see here is a delaying tactic which will tide them over until the winter COVID situation is known in Europe / other places where tourists come from. It's only early yet and we don't know exactly how it's going to play out in Europe during the colder months. When it gets cold there will either be an explosion of new cases all over Europe or nothing will happen as they've already had it or got some measure of immunity through vaccination. This is how I viewed it last year, it came back stronger than ever in Europe during October - December 2020 and signalled a much longer term problem than many had previously predicted. Personally I expect the same thing to happen this year as last year.

Yes, absolutely, you have to remember for many people they don't realise they're infected and it spreads silently and without detection until someone gets ill enough to go to hospital, then the contact tracing begins and a new cluster is found. They're only finding a few of them. This is the same all around the world but in most places they're not really looking for it, they treat the ill and tell anyone who notices that they're infected to stay home for a while until it's gone. There's no fuel being added to the fire, it's already raging. I know how some Thais are behaving when they get ill as well and they're not jumping in a taxi and reporting to the nearest quarantine camp - they're doing everything they can to avoid those places...

COVID is everywhere in Thailand, a few more from double vaccinated tourists will make no difference whatsoever. I guess what I'm saying is - I agree with the professor (I think it was a professor) who recently said in an article posted in the news section of this forum that millions of people have COVID right now in Thailand - forget about the tiny number of cases they find each day - that bears no relevance to the reality on the ground at all.

It's about 6 weeks right now.

I wonder what AstraZeneca have to say about this?

Lol, this is not going to go down very well with the overbearing rule-book waving barrier building obstructionist civil servants at all.

A lot less than would do if they can simply own it.

The existing policy is literally enshrined in the country name : Thai land. I don't think this is a coincidence.