Guderian

My immediate reaction to this brainwave was along the lines of <deleted>*&%!£<deleted><deleted>***^%&,deleted>, lol. But checking on the suggestion seems to show that it might not be a bad idea after all in situations where vaccine supplies are extremely limited. Personally, I think this needs a year or so of controlled testing in several countries, not a Thai syringe-jockey doing it at random like some oriental Harold Shipman, but they don't seem to be big on testing things or on patience here at the moment. https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210802/Intradermal-administration-of-low-dose-mRNA-COVID-19-vaccine-induces-strong-immune-response-study-finds.aspx

Jomtien Beach is certainly looking a heck of a lot cleaner and more pleasant without any tourists or litter or jet bikes or banana boats. I doubt anyone's seen it looking like this for 40 years or more.

Yes, I'm sure both Prayut and Anutin are rueing the fact that they both had a double dose of AZ, instead of Sinovac followed by ChulaCov19, with a booster of HXP-GPOVac, lol.

Ye Gods, is this article serious? Has the author ever actually gone outside at night, looked up at the night sky and tried to identify the small, flickering things up there? They're not the spirits of your ancestors, you know! Of course Jupiter's visible to the naked eye, it's usually the third brightest object in the night sky, after the moon and Venus.

In Jomtien, your dog is allowed to walk on the beach, but you are not. Says it all, really, lol.

Yeah, after decades of resisting the pressure to introduce a national ID system due to concerns over privacy, the pandemic has allowed a far more intrusive and potentially powerful state database to come into existence to control many aspects of our lives. You watch, it's not going away and sooner or later it will be extended to include stuff like your annual carbon allowance. Computer says no, you can't go into a pub because you haven't had the right vaccines. Computer says no, you can't book a flight to Thailand because you don't have enough carbon credits left. Orwell would have been astounded by just how quickly this is happening to us, it didn’t need decades of war and military dictatorship, it's all happening under a supposedly libertarian PM.

I'm going with the International Certificate of Vaccination (the famous yellow book), which is very widely used and recognised all around the world. The latest version has a page specifically for Covid-19 vaccines. I've been told that the hospital will enter the relevant data in it after I receive my second shot, as well as giving me the Thai proof of vaccination. I got my new yellow book from Amazon.co.uk, it cost less than a fiver, and had it sent to me here.

This was a summary of the situation regarding vaccination of foreigners around 20th July, so four weeks ago, and it's interesting to see the changes. Without going into a lot of tedious detail, it seems that around 70% of doses were given to migrant workers, almost all young and at no real risk from Covid. I guess they’re workers caught in factory or dormitory clusters who have been given priority for receiving vaccines over the elderly foreigners and those with chronic medical conditions. Resuming the production of widgets and doodads is evidently more important than protecting the lives of retired expats. Around 20% of the vaccines were second doses, and the rest were divvied up between the less-numerous foreign worker populations (like the Filipinos) and the foreign expats living here. The British and Americans, for example, received around 5,800 doses between them, or around 3% of the total given in the four-week period. So don’t worry, Thailand cares about you, just not enough, it seems, to give you any genuine priority to receive a potentially life-saving vaccine.

Try phoning some of the bakers around town, specifically The Continental on Thappraya road and the Bakhaus on Jomtien Second Road. There used to be a cake shop on Thepprasit, just around the corner from Thappraya, but I expect the Covid disaster has closed it. Even if the shops you call can't make them, perhaps they can suggest someone who can.

It's amusing how the article makes this sound as if it's a tremendous technical achievement, instead of being a case of clutching at straws as a result of a deeply-flawed (and that's putting it as nicely as I can!) vaccine procurement process.

The authorities have brought this on themselves due to the inept way they've handled the registration process. Many, if not most people have registered with more than one hospital for a vaccine, for obvious reasons. A mate of mine in Khorat, in his 70's and with type 2 diabetes, has been getting desperate for anything, and finally got a dose of AZ at Bumrungrad. Now he's being inundated with appointments from the five other places that he'd registered. I just hope that everybody is cancelling the other registrations they made once they've had the first dose, that might help to bring a little bit of sanity back into the system, as the second dose has to be in the same place where you got your first dose, as I understand it.

Poor journalism and fact-checking, but that's hardly news. Yes, J&J has been approved, otherwise how could the French have given it to all their citizens living here? https://covid19.trackvaccines.org/country/thailand/

It was sent using Royal Mail's tracking system, with some prescription tablets in the jiffy bag as well the postage cost was just over a tenner. It arrived in exactly one week, which is the norm these days. Check the Amazon website, the vendor might be willing to send it directly to you here. If not, just get it delivered to someone you know in the UK and ask them to send it on to you. Given the ridiculous nonsense there seems to be in getting one of these here in Thailand, I think it's well worth doing.

I heard that quite a few years ago now somebody, maybe City Hall or their TAT subsidiary, had sent a questionnaire to a lot of Chinese tourists asking them how they thought the beach front area could be improved. Apparently, the replies showed that the Chinese regard palm trees as highly attractive, and didn't want to see all those nasty big old shady trees with large leaves that looked just like the two trees still left standing in their home cities. And the rest, as they say, is history.

And if Bhutan says no, then I guess they'll just have to call up the boss in Beijing and beg him to send some more Sinovac. Who would have thought that Thailand would end up so friendless in the world, but with a government like this one it's not really surprising.

I thought that getting the yellow vaccination certificate book was a good idea. Nobody seems to know exactly what different countries will require in terms of proof, but at least the yellow book is already well-known and widely accepted. The latest version also has a page specifically for Covid-19 vaccinations. I got this one from Amazon.co.uk for less than a fiver, and my brother sent it to me along with the usual monthly parcel of NHS prescription medicines. It may work out and it may not, but it’s not expensive and at least it’s something recognisable that’s vaccine certificate-related.

Calling foreigners the scum of the earth? Hold the front page, Khun Anutin is on his way with a few choice things to say about them!

We've already got Dutch courage and now we have Chinese generosity! They're vaccinating their own people at a rate of 12 million doses a day, so 3 million is just a drop in the proverbial. And Sinovac? You couldn't even give it away in most Western countries, yet Thailand is like a puppy dog falling over itself with joy for a scrap tossed to it by its master.

Better to be honest about it: The current restrictions in place include interprovincial travel restrictions and a night time curfew, neither of which is being enforced by the police.

Well, unless you've been asleep the whole time, you should know by now that alcohol kills the virus very effectively, lol!

I gather that the Big Cheeses are meeting again tomorrow to discuss what to do next. The piece I read said the idea is that certain restrictions may be loosened to allow a few people to get back to work, like allowing some shops in malls to reopen. With Delta rampaging through the population, though, that doesn't sound sensible to me, and I have a suspicion that instead of loosening things we might see further tightening tomorrow. The one big thing they did in April/May last year that they haven't done this time around was to ban the sale of alcohol for a month or more. Are there any feelings/views/informed sources out there suggesting what will happen next, will they loosen or tighten our Covid bonds?

It's fine for a dirty weekend, but it's not a place to live as there's nothing else there. If you can afford it, Olongapo would be a good place to live, though very American. The location is lovely, Barrio Baretto provides enough nightlife to entertain you without having to go to Angeles, it has its own power generation station, and - very importantly - it's sheltered from typhoons coming off the Pacific by the mountains behind it. If that doesn't float your boat, maybe try Davao City in the south of Mindanao, but if you've been to General Santos then you probably know Davao already. Sabang and Puerto Galera on Mindoro are also nice places to live, and just an hour by boat to get back to Luzon if you want to go shopping or whatever.

We're still working our way through the Delta variant, have they taken into account the effects of the Epsilon and Lambda variants in these forecasts? Maybe in 2032, TAT, but definitely not next year, poor lambs.

My cleaner comes twice a month, but in between visits I seem to get a lot of small stones and stale bread crumbs and other sharpish bots and pieces lying around the place. I'm not looking for a replacement for the cleaner, but thought that having a robot vacuum roam around the place once or twice a week and clean up the annoying small bits and pieces that seem to come from nowhere might be a good idea. Looking at Lazada, I see that the top models are up around the 30K or 40K Baht mark, more than I paid for my smartphone, so way to expensive for what I want. There are a few below 10K, but they lack features like auto-room mapping, and I expect they have other limitations too. Given that I'm just looking for something to do a quick sweep of crumbs and so on once a week or so, a cheaper one ought to be OK, but not if it's going to get stuck in a corner for an hour until the battery runs out, or go in circles in the middle of the room. Does anybody have a robot vacuum cleaner, especially one of the newer models and would you care to share your experiences and opinions?