UAE bans citizens from travelling to Thailand, Kuwait suspends flights

[WaveHunter]

ARE CASES OF COVID-19 BEING UNDER_REPORTED IN THAILAND?

There are a number of valid reasons to suspect that the actual cases of Covid-19 in Thailand are under-reported.  

 

It's not simply a transparency issue on the part of the government.  In fact, The Ministry of Public health has already acknowledged there was a fairly serious problem with the screening and detection process.  New guidelines and procedures were put into effect last week.

 

There are also scientific studies that forecasted those countries that would be most at risk from the spread of Covid-19 outside of China, and the studies were correct at forecasting the top 5 countries...all except Thailand which was in the #1 spot.  For some reason it was the only outlier, and the big question is why was Thailand the only outlier of the group.  The answer could very likely be that cases were missed in Thailand...a lot of cases.

 

So, in the interest of those who want to look at this from a scientific and fact-based perspective, I'm going to post the three reasons that make a pretty convincing argument that cases are being underreported.  I am backing them up with objective, science-based data and information and not providing any personal views...JUST THE FACTS.

 

I'll post them separately, one by one.

 

[WaveHunter]

#1 SCIENTIFIC BASIS FOR BELIEVING THE CASES IN THAILAND MAY BE UNDERREPORTED

So, firstly there is this modelling study, "Assessing spread risk of Wuhan coronavirus within and beyond China, January-April 2020: a travel network-based modelling study  Note, this is not yet peer reviewed.  It was written about two weeks ago.

 

Based on this modelling study, they were able to assess which countries and cities were most at risk for importation of the virus.  What they found is that Thailand should be #1.  It also showed Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea at the top of the list.

 

With the exception of Thailand, all the other locations were accurately forecasted.  So the big questions is WHY WAS THAILAND THE ONLY OUTLIER in this group?

 

 

If you look at this graph in the study showing actual cases reported as of two weeks ago, you can see that the number of cases (on the vertical Y axis) correlated well with their estimated risks shown in the table above.  However, Thailand is the outlier.  You can see that the number of cases is less than you'd expect from the table.

So why is Thailand the outlier here?  There is a high probability that Thailand has missed some of the cases.  In fact, the Ministry of Public health in Thailand now acknowledges this is probably the case, and last week they instituted completely new and much more aggressive screening guidelines and have begun an enhanced second round of tightened screening using the new criteria in 8 provinces popular with Chinese tourists.

 

There is also another report released by the World Health Organization (WHO) and prepared by the Imperial College of London, entitled: Report 6: Relative sensitivity of international surveillance

 

It looked at the actual number of people that travelled from infected areas of China and compared that to the number of cases of Chinese travellers that had been detected with the virus in those countries. 

 

FIGURE 1:  What you see in this graph is that the cases of infected Chinese travellers that have been detected in those countries on the Y axis (vertical axis) works pretty well with the air traffic from Wuhan (on the X axis)

 

FIGURE 2 EXPECTED VS OBSERVED CASES:  Based on their analysis and assumption that countries like Singapore have been pretty good at detecting infected Chinese travelers, they were able to estimate how many cases of Covid-19 should have been detected in those Chinese travelers for the various countries shown.

As you can see, Thailand had many less observed cases (X-axis) than the number that was expected (on the Y-axis). 

 

Since this model proved accurate with Singapore, and most of the other countries tracked, Thailand is again an outlier, and indicates that perhaps these cases of infection were missed.

 

So, these two studies are are not proof that Thailand has more cases than being reported, but they are strong indicators of that being the case.

[Knocker33]

On 2/25/2020 at 9:29 AM, stevenl said:

Nothing, they're just panicking due to the number of Chinese visitors to Thjailand.

 

The panic and reactions by governments are simply due to overreaction by uninformed people on social media.

So the government's are overreacting to social media. Pray tell us professor Steven. What would you do. 

[kingdong]

8 hours ago, emptypockets said:

Every passenger passes a thermal scanner at Swampy International. No idea if domestic travellers are checked although I had my temp taken at Satuek. This is standard check at a lot of airports with current situation. The poster may not have seen the scanners but I did. What more can be done in a practical sense?

Ban flights from china?

[Traubert]

4 hours ago, WaveHunter said:

 

Case closed.

Thank heavens for that. Nothing worse than an armchair expert.

 

So what are you doing about it?

[Just Weird]

On 2/25/2020 at 9:06 AM, Canuck1966 said:

Going to be lots of overstay issues kicking in soon, if these bans continue!

Allowances are being made for overstays linked to the inability to travel out of the country due to Covid-19, Immigration announced it some time ago.

[Just Weird]

On 2/25/2020 at 9:08 AM, Maverell said:

So what do these countries know, that we don't, if they are banning travel to Thailand?

That there have been a few cases of Covid-19 here and they're hedging their bets, perhaps?  Thailand isn't the only country affected by this announcement!

[bermondburi]

9 hours ago, retsdon said:

No idea about transiting through BAH, but since Sunday Bahrain has banned direct entry into the country from Thailand - anyone coming from Thailand will need to have spent 2 weeks outside Thailand before they will be allowed in, regardless of nationality. 

I know this because it's just cost me money!

You got a source for that because I was in my local gulf air office yesterday afternoon arranging a hotel for transit for wife and kids on route to the UK for a couple of weeks from now. 

 

I asked about corona and he said as long as they had been in Thailand for at least 2 weeks and were showing no signs of sickness they were fine to travel. I told him they lived there, and he quite happily arranged the hotel. At no cost to me I might add so it wasn't like they were making money from me. In fact it's costing them money to put them up in Bahrain. 

 

This was yesterday, Tuesday. So what happened to you? 

 

It would be impossible for anyone coming from Thailand to spend 2 weeks outside Thailand before arriving in Bahrain. There would be no one on the plane, BKK BAH. 

[rickudon]

I guess that pandemic bond will be triggered by Iran tomorrow...... now on 19 deaths, one to go .....

[humbug]

you need a lot of resources and good public health care system to test and try and keep some sort of control of infected people knowing that maybe 25% are tested and 75% have got away, if it’s a lesser public health system and little resources then maybe 5% are tested and 95% got away, if it doubles every 6 days, that’s a lot of infected people, granted mostly mild,

 

the Korean CDC, cdc.go.kor  as of today, they have tested 44,000 and have 16,000 undergoing tests today, that just shows how S. korea is able to try to find infected patients and has over 1,000 confirmed infected people, lands controlled by gangsters just play the game a whole different way when it comes to human rights

[ukrules]

8 hours ago, emptypockets said:

They are both viruses.

I'm calling it Wuhan Flu, I don't give a <deleted> what the WHO says.

[Farma]

@bermondburi. If I was you I'd be double/triple  checking what you were told. I have a feeling you misheard when he said as long as they had been in Thailand for at least 2 weeks and were showing no signs of sickness they were fine to travel.

 

Going by the latest IATA and mofa info I would think he meant "not been".

 

As for Transit. Where's the transit hotel? It's not in the airport. They would need to clear immigration to go across from the airport to the closest hotel.

[Jumbo1968]

3 minutes ago, Farma said:

@bermondburi. If I was you I'd be double/triple  checking what you were told. I have a feeling you misheard when he said as long as they had been in Thailand for at least 2 weeks and were showing no signs of sickness they were fine to travel.

 

Going by the latest IATA and mofa info I would think he meant "not been".

 

As for Transit. Where's the transit hotel? It's not in the airport. They would need to clear immigration to go across from the airport to the closest hotel.

Major Airports have hotels within them therefore there is no need to venture outwith the airport.

[bermondburi]

2 minutes ago, Farma said:

@bermondburi. If I was you I'd be double/triple  checking what you were told. I have a feeling you misheard when he said as long as they had been in Thailand for at least 2 weeks and were showing no signs of sickness they were fine to travel.

 

Going by the latest IATA and mofa info I would think he meant "not been".

 

As for Transit. Where's the transit hotel? It's not in the airport. They would need to clear immigration to go across from the airport to the closest hotel.

Yeah, I will be going back to the office in Saudi tomorrow to check again. 

 

ATEOTD, I'm not bothered about the hotel. Its free anyway. Just so long as they can fly. If we have to sit in the lounge for 10 hours so be it. 

 

I'll be meeting them in Bahrain at the airport coming from saudi. 

 

 

[Farma]

@Jumbo1968 you obviously haven't been to Bahrain airport.

 

@burmondburi Good luck hopefully things will calm down soon. Had 3 Saudis today mention the causeway could be closed if the situation worsens in Bahrain. All asked immigration on the causeway what was going to happen. They were cautious with one officer saying they were waiting to see what happens in the next 48 hours.

[Jumbo1968]

A colleague travelled back to Heathrow today from BKK, nothing different apart from them announcing if you had flu like systems when you got back contact a Doctor

[MarkyM3]

I'm due to fly Gulf Air BKK-LHR via Bahrain on Sunday night. Got to be concerned about this, though the current statement on Gulf website says flights are continuing, albeit 4 hours check-in is recommended and transit passengers are not barred from entering Bahrain. All could change in coming days, of course.

 

The stopover is only 2 hours so if extra checks are deployed at Bahrain, could cause further issues.

Edited February 26, 2020 by MarkyM3

[sandrabbit]

8 hours ago, WaveHunter said:

#1 SCIENTIFIC BASIS FOR BELIEVING THE CASES IN THAILAND MAY BE UNDERREPORTED

So, firstly there is this modelling study, "Assessing spread risk of Wuhan coronavirus within and beyond China, January-April 2020: a travel network-based modelling study  Note, this is not yet peer reviewed.  It was written about two weeks ago.

 

Based on this modelling study, they were able to assess which countries and cities were most at risk for importation of the virus.  What they found is that Thailand should be #1.  It also showed Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea at the top of the list.

 

With the exception of Thailand, all the other locations were accurately forecasted.  So the big questions is WHY WAS THAILAND THE ONLY OUTLIER in this group?

 

 

If you look at this graph in the study showing actual cases reported as of two weeks ago, you can see that the number of cases (on the vertical Y axis) correlated well with their estimated risks shown in the table above.  However, Thailand is the outlier.  You can see that the number of cases is less than you'd expect from the table.

So why is Thailand the outlier here?  There is a high probability that Thailand has missed some of the cases.  In fact, the Ministry of Public health in Thailand now acknowledges this is probably the case, and last week they instituted completely new and much more aggressive screening guidelines and have begun an enhanced second round of tightened screening using the new criteria in 8 provinces popular with Chinese tourists.

 

There is also another report released by the World Health Organization (WHO) and prepared by the Imperial College of London, entitled: Report 6: Relative sensitivity of international surveillance

 

It looked at the actual number of people that travelled from infected areas of China and compared that to the number of cases of Chinese travellers that had been detected with the virus in those countries. 

 

FIGURE 1:  What you see in this graph is that the cases of infected Chinese travellers that have been detected in those countries on the Y axis (vertical axis) works pretty well with the air traffic from Wuhan (on the X axis)

 

FIGURE 2 EXPECTED VS OBSERVED CASES:  Based on their analysis and assumption that countries like Singapore have been pretty good at detecting infected Chinese travelers, they were able to estimate how many cases of Covid-19 should have been detected in those Chinese travelers for the various countries shown.

As you can see, Thailand had many less observed cases (X-axis) than the number that was expected (on the Y-axis). 

 

Since this model proved accurate with Singapore, and most of the other countries tracked, Thailand is again an outlier, and indicates that perhaps these cases of infection were missed.

 

So, these two studies are are not proof that Thailand has more cases than being reported, but they are strong indicators of that being the case.

please stop posting a linear graph, I'm industrial electronics and that's not exponential and then you have the discussion whether it should be base 10 or natural logs and as it is to do with the natural world maybe it should natural logs.............

[Traubert]

14 minutes ago, sandrabbit said:

please stop posting a linear graph, I'm industrial electronics and that's not exponential and then you have the discussion whether it should be base 10 or natural logs and as it is to do with the natural world maybe it should natural logs.............

He has no interest in posting the exponential graph of the recovery numbers so he's just another scare troll to me.

[NanLaew]

22 hours ago, DannyCarlton said:

I saw 8 young Chinese men coming out of Jomtien immigration 2 days ago.

And thus you can unequivocally state that the masses of Chinese tour groups are still coming. I see.

 

Now what on earth would 8 Chinese group tourists be doing a Jomtien Immigration? The answer is nothing because they weren't tourists. There's quite a lot of Chinese who, like the Russians-with-money that preceded them, have been buying condos and other properties in and around Pattaya for the best part of about 5 years already. So, just like you and other farangs, they live here and they go to Jomtien for 90-day reports and extensions of stay. Chances are they, like most farangs contributing to the perpetual negative narrative here, haven't been back home for a while.

[DannyCarlton]

2 minutes ago, NanLaew said:

And thus you can unequivocally state that the masses of Chinese tour groups are still coming. I see.

 

Now what on earth would 8 Chinese group tourists be doing a Jomtien Immigration? The answer is nothing because they weren't tourists. There's quite a lot of Chinese who, like the Russians-with-money that preceded them, have been buying condos and other properties in and around Pattaya for the best part of about 5 years already. So, just like you and other farangs, they live here and they go to Jomtien for 90-day reports and extensions of stay. Chances are they, like most farangs contributing to the perpetual negative narrative here, haven't been back home for a while.

How wrong can you be? "I see?" You see nothing at all.

 

Did I even mention Chinese tour groups? No. Something you didn't see.

 

This was a group of 8 young guys. Clearly here on holiday.

 

Why were they at immigration? To extend their tourist visas.

 

OK. Back to sleep now. You clearly have more dreaming to do.

[unsubscribe]

On 2/24/2020 at 8:28 PM, Tayaout said:

Yes, I was the first to post this chart and now it gets reposted all the time. After investigation the source of the data is gathered via opensource information. It means that they trust what the various government publish to draw this graph and did not verify any of the data. 

 

 

https://youtu.be/nx7lhj25__c?t=2663

[WaveHunter]

7 hours ago, sandrabbit said:

please stop posting a linear graph, I'm industrial electronics and that's not exponential and then you have the discussion whether it should be base 10 or natural logs and as it is to do with the natural world maybe it should natural logs.............

If you want to see log graphs associated with the virus,see

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

 

Most of their key charts are shown both as linear and log, and it's probably one of the best sites for up-to-date and accurate stats, along with late breaking news from all the international "hot spots".

 

In the case of the graph I presented in this post, it was entirely appropriate to show it as a linear chart since the purpose was simply to show the static relationship of variables shown in the table.  Showing growth acceleration was not its' purpose.

 

Edited February 27, 2020 by WaveHunter

[NanLaew]

15 hours ago, Jumbo1968 said:

A colleague travelled back to Heathrow today from BKK, nothing different apart from them announcing if you had flu like systems when you got back contact a Doctor

I arrived back in Manchester at 8 pm last night, no drama beyond the passport scanner sending me around the corner for secondary inspection.

 

Oh yes, and the bit of sleet on the M6.

[NanLaew]

6 hours ago, DannyCarlton said:

How wrong can you be? "I see?" You see nothing at all.

 

Did I even mention Chinese tour groups? No. Something you didn't see.

 

This was a group of 8 young guys. Clearly here on holiday.

 

Why were they at immigration? To extend their tourist visas.

 

OK. Back to sleep now. You clearly have more dreaming to do.

Oh, so now you BELATEDLY tell us that they were all 'young' guys 'clearly on holiday' and KNOW they were specifically extending TR's. That's an impressively  unique skill set you have there Danny. To track the precise activities of a specific group in Jomtien Immigration's busy office right down to their nationalities. Most people are busy just tracking your own business there and hustling to get done quick. Next you'll be telling us that they were from Anhui, probably asymptomatic but the oldest looked like he could be a superspreader.

 

On the other hand, and giving you the benefit of the doubt, if they weren't Koreans but were Chinese, had left China BEFORE this kicked off, were displaying no symptoms and had the opportunity NOT to return home right now, then why not extend? If this corona virus ground-zero had been in England, Jomtien Immigration would be chock full of Englander's pleading to over-extend with the ones who have already maxed-out their days here claiming refugee status.

 

Yes Danny some people see and some don't see but it doesn't preclude those that were there from making things up drawing the wrong conclusions from what they see.

[NanLaew]

19 hours ago, WaveHunter said:

#1 SCIENTIFIC BASIS FOR BELIEVING THE CASES IN THAILAND MAY BE UNDERREPORTED

So, firstly there is this modelling study, "Assessing spread risk of Wuhan coronavirus within and beyond China, January-April 2020: a travel network-based modelling study  Note, this is not yet peer reviewed.  It was written about two weeks ago.

Yes, not peer reviewed and was being touted as 'evidence' in at least one UK media stream over a month ago without gaining any traction. It uses 'IATA data' as well as '5 year-old Chinese cell phone network data' from China's answer to google to come up with their magical list of predictions for the 'current' situation. I thought it strange how Singapore Changi's much higher passenger throughput than Bangkok Suvarnabhumi's didn't seem to make Singapore the more risky venue whereas actual, real-world statistics confirm that Singapore is the more hazardous location.

[NanLaew]

On 2/25/2020 at 10:36 AM, SCOTT FITZGERSLD said:

it looks very bad.

those countries than ban travel to thailand DO KNOW SOMETHING.

but if i was the thai government i would try to hide the real numbers, need

to understand that this situation is a nightmare for a country like thailand, that

lives off tourism.

very dangerous for farang especialy, as they can become the scapegoats.

the health minister allready called AI FARANG to be expelled from thailand.

if there will be curfew on bangkok and food shortage farang won't be safe.

even the security personals might attack them, out of desperation.

not a good time.

Oh wow... so we may become targets after dark just because we may have some food that they want? Have you started your local Farang Defence League to address this dire risk to life and limb? Stockpiled food and water and whatever weapons we may need for self defence?

 

Are you even in the country?

[Nong Khai Man]

On 2/25/2020 at 9:03 AM, Vacuum said:

Meanwhile; Thai officials let all Chinese tourist enter Thailand with open arms...

But...............THEY are the BIG Spenders, Ain't They ??

[Jumbo1968]

Lady been on phone BBC 5Live just now she and her husband have just returned from Kathmandu via Bangkok. He has developed flu like systems on his return to the UK, after several calls to 111 they were advised to go to Stoke Mandeville Hospital for tests, no results as yet.

[ravip]

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)
Situation Report – 37

26 February 2020

 

Many rumours, misinformation and halucinary situations of some people in paranoia are going viral on the social media currently.