Guderian

As soon as they lift the restrictions and start to welcome foreigners one more, the daily new case load will take off again (assuming that the decrease we're currently seeing isn't simply being gerrymandered), regardless of how many people have been vaccinated. The UK, US and Israel all show this and, not least of all, so does Phuket. The Thai government now regards the criterion for reopening to foreign tourists as having 70% of the adult population with one jab, so not in any way fully-protected. This means that the inevitable rise in new cases will result in far more deaths than the advanced economies are seeing and, unless the government is willing to accept many hundreds of deaths every day, they will just end up banging the door shut again and returning to some sort of lockdown. Be patient, get the people properly vaccinated, and then try reopening, because the current plan isn't going to work well.

Sunday numbers, they're not usually a very reliable guide to what's really going on. Unless the numbers are being manipulated, of course, but surely this paragon of honesty and decency called the Thai Government would never do that, would they, lol?

So you can get as fat as a pig by eating in restaurants again, and even have a trim and a foot massage so that you will look nice and tidy and relaxed when they put you in your coffin after the coronary, but you're still not allowed to exercise in gyms or pools? If this is a reflection of the priorities by which this country is governed, then it's no wonder so many Thai kids these days look like miniature versions of the Incredible Hulk.

Worse than Iran, South Africa and Peru? Oh my Buddha, what a loss of face, hand the PM his seppuku kit immediately!

On a pro-rata basis, the infection rate per head in Phuket is now a lot worse than it is for Thailand as a whole (42/100K vs. 27/100K). Given the level of vaccination in the local population, and the strict controls the governor has introduced regarding entry to the island since the sandbox started, I'd really like to know how and why this has happened. Has the CCSA, DDC or Laurel & Hardy (aka Prayut & Anutin) got an explanation?

The Birds won! I usually go for an afternoon stroll along Jomtien Beach, but yesterday I went to Pattaya Beach instead for the first time in ages. It makes Jomtien seem full of life and joy, this is amazingly depressing.

It will all look nice and neat and tidy for the air-conditioned coach loads of Chinese tourists driving past on Beach Road, while the farangs and Thais wanting to enjoy a shady spot by the sea for an hour will simply have to roast in the sun, or grease the palms of the deck chair mafia. But as long as the Chinese tourists are happy, that's all the mayor cares about, the Pattaya City vaccination programme (as opposed to the national one) shows that he's completely unaware that there are such creatures as farangs actually living in his city.

It looks to me like the Big Cheese is intent on sticking to his mid-October reopening plan, no matter what. That's six weeks away, so even in their most optimistic predictions they'll have fully vaccinated less than 20% of the population. Lifting all restrictions + low vaccination coverage = more unnecessary suffering and deaths. I just want to know at what point the Big Cheese will decide that enough is enough and close things down again. Will 500 deaths a day do the trick? Or 1,000, or double that number? It's obvious that the country is heading for yet another covid disaster, fueled by the greed and hubris of its politicians, so it's best for us mere mortals to be prepared.

Can they please advise us what number of daily new cases and deaths will result in them reimposing the restrictions?

Sooner or later they'll work out that you can actually get 20 doses out of a 10-dose vial if you dilute it with the same volume of saline, an innovation developed in Germany, lol.

What light at the end of the tunnel? Is it the drop in daily case numbers from 23,000 to 18,000, which is anyway probably a result of reduced testing for the main part? Or is it the 8.2% of the population that is so far fully vaccinated (including, of course, Prayut and Anutin)? Because I'm not seeing much light this year, to be honest. Drop the restrictions in the coming week, as is being suggested, and then sit back and watch as the new cases and deaths start rocketing upwards again. Unless the Two Stooges are happy to condemn thousands of their countryfolk to an early and unnecessary death, they need to grin and bear the lockdown until they have a large enough portion of the population fully vaccinated, not a paltry 8%! And the snail-like pace of the vaccine rollout is entirely their own fault, there's nobody else to blame, the greed and corruption here is actively destroying the economy and killing innocent people.

Why focus so much on case numbers, especially asymptomatic ones? Please tell us the most important number, how many avoidable deaths will be caused by reopening. After all, most people recover when they get Covid, but death is final.

Between this announcement and the one a day or two ago about them telling the CCSA to relax restrictions, this NCDC is starting to sound like it's taken over the roles of TAT, the Tourism Ministry, the Health Ministry and the Finance Ministry, and is now single-handedly running the Covid clusterfu show. Maybe it should change its moniker from NCDC to NCDE, the National Committee for Doing Everything, lol.

As with so much else in the vaccination rollout here, this makes a mockery of what they're doing. I don't know about the mass vacination places like Bang Sue, but all the hospitals seem to insist on taking your BP before they will give you a vaccine. If they regard the reading as being unacceptably high, you're told to sit and wait for a while to relax and allow it to go down to normal. In theory, if it doesn't go down to whatever they regard as an acceptable level, then they will turn you away unvaccinated and tell you to come back. I've heard of this happening to a Thai lady, but not to any expats so far. But why bother if BP is such a major risk, surely it's best for people to get vaccinated against Covid regardless of how high their BP is. You could even argue that people with abnormally high BP should have the waiting period for the second dose reduced (from 12 weeks in the case of AZ) to help give them maximum protection ASAP. Instead, they're refusing to vaccinate the group they now claim are among the most vulnerable. Ting tong, or what?

I went down to Na Jomtien yesterday, just missed the lights at Chaiyapruek and sat there waiting for them to change for five minutes. Now half a click further on there's another set of lights at the Second Road junction which I also missed, though they changed back to green a lot faster than the ones at Chaiyapruek. Clearly a work in progress then, the Pattaya CIty traffic engineers will have to spend some time on the phasing to make sure there's no chance of them being green if you've just come from the Chaiypruek junction, and to make sure the wait last several minutes at least before you get a green again. Just what Suk didn't need, yet more wretched traffic lights.

The cops obviously didn't get the memo about "Thailand learning to live with Covid", lol.

Oh surely, these are just minor issues that can't be allowed to delay the Pattaya Catflap from starting up, lol. Welcome to Neo Pattaya, where you're not even allowed on the beach, never mind to enjoy a swim in the sea or a swimming pool. The resort city is famous for its selection of fine restauarants offering you the very best takeaway and home delivery services. And for a refreshing drink, why not pop into one of the many modern convenience stores, where a cooling beer can be taken back to your room to be drunk in private, no public alcohol consumption, please. But don't forget to be back at your hotel before 9:00 PM, or you'll be breaking the curfew and might be slung in jail for the night.

I managed to get hold of a few pages of the peoples' responses to the poll, but unfortunately they had already redacted all the curses, insults and swear words.

I thought I might as well add my impressions of the Watties baked beans. The beans themselves are a bit on the small side for my taste, very similar to Brooks. I prefer them a little bit larger, like Heinz and SPC, but nothing like as gigantic as the mutant monsters in the Ajam baked beans, lol. The sauce is nice and rich but a bit too sweet for my palette, though I expect if you grew up eating Watties then you'd probbaly find other brands like Heinz a bit on the bland side of things. Just my thoughts, anyway.

Well, you can argue the pros and cons of moderate alcohol consumption, but I'm more concerned that places like Pattaya have, in effect, been forced by the muppets in government to ban almost all forms of exercise. There's no argument or debate to be had there, exercise is undoubtedly a very good thing for people to "consume". Yet rather than spend a bit of effort policing the sea and beaches and preventing people from engaging in behaviour that might present a Covid risk, they've simply stopped anyone from using the beaches or sea for exercise, never mind the swimming pools and gyms. I was surprised to find that the Chonburi governor and mayor of Pattaya had no problem with pools remaining open as they said not a single case of Covid had been traced back to swimming. Then along came the Idiot-in-Chief and his herd of buffalo-ministers who immediately decided that this exercise thing is clearly a huge risk to the nation's health and must be stopped immediately, when in fact the opposite is self-evidently true.

Why on earth would they expect an effective level of antibodies to have been built up just 2 weeks after the first vaccination? This is a vaccine, not a genie in a lamp. https://www.health.gov.au/initiatives-and-programs/covid-19-vaccines/is-it-true/is-it-true-how-long-does-it-take-to-have-immunity-after-vaccination Bloomberg says that, as of today, 28% of the Thai population has received at least one dose of something or other (roughly speaking, 50% AZ or Pfizer and 50% Chinese vaccines), while just 8% have received both doses. Since 72% of the population is currently unvaccinated, why would it be surprising that 63.8% of deaths were among the unvaccinated? In fact, it is surprising, given Sinovac's relatively poor effectiveness, that more of the deaths weren't among the fully-vaccinated, since many of them will be health workers constantly exposed to a high level of risk but only having had two doses of Sinovac to protect them, at least until the recent booster programme started.

Any sign of the hairdressers opening yet, I really could use a trim...

The population of Phuket is around 400,000 and they have 101 cases. Thailand's population is very close to 70 million, so pro-rating the Phuket case number gives 101 * 70 million/400,000 = 17,675 new cases nationally. That's compared with the actual number reported today of 20,571. In other words, Phuket's high vaccination level, self-isolation from the mainland, and all of its attempts to keep the population safe from Covid have made hardly any difference at all to the number of cases compared with greater Thailand. Either the sandbox scheme has been a public health disaster and should be closed down immediately, or else it's been a great success, in which case the numbers show that Thailand may as well extend the sandbox to the whole country. So which one is it?

Oh dear, it seems that the PM and his health minister have finally

Indeed, you'd have to be extremely desperate to want to come here at the moment. There were northern mining towns, after their pits were closed in the 1980's, that had more fun and life in them than Pattaya does right now. Here's an idea, Mr. TAT, I gather that a lot of people in Kabul would be extremely interested in a trip to Thailand, maybe send some lacky to invite them to visit Bangkok. Who knows, perhaps their friends in the Taliban would follow them here, imagine the visitor numbers TAT could boast about then!