Thailand reports another fall in new COVID-19 infections

[dinsdale]

3 hours ago, Sheryl said:

 

They are testing all contacts of identified cases.

 

The rate of positivity in Bangkok is way too low to make random mass testing remotely worthwhile.

 

The population of Bangkok is 11 million. 23 cases is not at all a  lot.

Around a year ago there was 1 in the USA.

[Suua]

14 minutes ago, FarFlungFalang said:

The rate of positivity in Bangkok is way too low to make random mass testing remotely worthwhile.

Just recently the UK tracked some folks that have the South African strain, which is more worrying with regards to vaccine efficacy. 

They mass tested everywhere these people had been and asked the public in the affected area to get themselves tested.

It's too dangerous not to. 

If the strains are not stopped asap it's not a good outlook. 

It's dereliction of duty to humanity, not to mass test regardless of cost. 

To allow mutations by burying your head in the sand is criminal in my opinion. 

[FarFlungFalang]

8 minutes ago, polpott said:

My daughter and her husband both work on the frontlie in a UK hospital. They assure me that your post is complete fiction.

You mean there are dead bodies lining the streets?The media has reported that the UK hospitals are put under great strain each year for quite a few years now.

[polpott]

2 minutes ago, FarFlungFalang said:

You mean there are dead bodies lining the streets?The media has reported that the UK hospitals are put under great strain each year for quite a few years now.

Nowhere near the strain they are under at the moment.

[ThailandRyan]

3 hours ago, anchadian said:

You're asking for trouble going on 12km walks in the evening.

 

Be sensible.

Your right we need to kick it up a notch, never going to make my Goal of 2500Km for the year if I dont push it....Thanks.  Yes trouble on the horizon as my doctor won't be happy when my A1C and other levels go up because of a lack of hours per week being walked.

[ThailandRyan]

3 hours ago, Bkk Brian said:

Looks like its going to be the next hotspot. Just published in the Nation

 

54 Covid-19 cases found in Bangkok after proactive testing in factories

 

https://www.nationthailand.com/news/30402321?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=internal_referral

 

 

Maybe that's why they are preparing all of the field hospital beds, just maybe.

[Donga]

Thailand is again demonstrating how to manage Covid without going overboard with restrictions. While Boris has just announced hotel quarantine for people from risky countries, good grief.

Telling contrast and there are other factors that explain why Thailand is internationally recognised as one of the best performers in dealing with Covid. 

[mrfill]

3 hours ago, polpott said:

People seem to think that the testing is working in Western countries. My friend in the UK knows 2 people who died in the first wave and last week a mutual friend of ours died after 3 days in hospital. None had been subject to random testing. My friend lives in a high risk area and has never been offered a test.

The UK has not done random testing. You can only book a test if you are showing symptoms.

https://www.gov.uk/get-coronavirus-test

[FarFlungFalang]

58 minutes ago, polpott said:

Nowhere near the strain they are under at the moment.

Yes a bad year but that doesn't make my post a "complete fiction" does it?You must learn to use the correct words in your post and not accuse people of being completely fictitious when you are trying to be dramatic.Also are you saying you checked with your daughter and her husband and they actually said that my post was completely fictitious?I find that pretty hard to believe.I think that as usual you are talking out of your rear end.

[FarFlungFalang]

25 minutes ago, Donga said:

Telling contrast and there are other factors that explain why Thailand is internationally recognised as one of the best performers in dealing with Covid. 

Don't forget the part about Thailand being ranked 104th in the world for transparency and corruption now will you? Because that might have a bearing on the validity of the information they release to to world.

[Sheryl]

1 hour ago, Suua said:

Just recently the UK tracked some folks that have the South African strain, which is more worrying with regards to vaccine efficacy. 

They mass tested everywhere these people had been and asked the public in the affected area to get themselves tested.

 

 

that is no different from the testing the Thai government is doing. They, too, are doing active  case finding by testing people who have been in contact with, or been in the same places as, known cases. They, too, announce venues where an infected person has been and urge everyone who was there to be tested.

 

140,000 people tested in Samut Sakhon in less than 2 months. Smaller numbers (but still far more than the "no testing" people on this board like to claim) in other locations.ate.

 

I would not call that "mass testing", it is targeted. And it is not what some people on this board are  insisting should be done. They want millions of people with no known risk factors, not known to have had contact with an infected person, in areas of very low disease birden based on hospitalizations, to be tested at a cost of billions of baht. A completely insane approach and one  no country with similar burden of disease has undertaken.

[FarFlungFalang]

10 minutes ago, Sheryl said:

A completely insane approach and one  no country with similar burden of disease has undertaken.

Australia currently has less burden of disease and overall quite similar being only 7 places from Thailand on the worldometer list with the gap rapidly closing, and has done 13,218,167 tests with 514,791 tests per million population compared to Thailand which has tested 1,217,873 with 17,422  tests per million population which is quite a staggering difference wouldn't you say Sheryl?It kind of puts your statement into perspective in my opinion.Are you saying that Australia's approach is insane?

[unblocktheplanet]

6 hours ago, KhunG said:

Per Richard Barrow:

 

Bangkok 23
Tak 2
Songkhram 1
Phetchaburi 1
Samut Sakhon 40

 

 

All walk-ins, which means people who thought they were in contact with a Covid+ person or had symptoms. MASS TESTING NOW! Quit playing political games with public health & safety.

[sapson]

5 hours ago, Bkk Brian said:

Looks like its going to be the next hotspot. Just published in the Nation

 

54 Covid-19 cases found in Bangkok after proactive testing in factories

 

 

Key words here being proactive testing .....if that was applied at the major city in each province nationwide a real picture of Thailands Covid situation would be revealed, which is why it isnt done.

[Bruce Aussie Chiang Mai]

Well done Thsiland with approx 40% reduction. 

Got by the short and curlies now.

????❤????????

[Bkk Brian]

3 hours ago, mrfill said:

The UK has not done random testing. You can only book a test if you are showing symptoms.

https://www.gov.uk/get-coronavirus-test

It has, plenty of it and much more ongoing.

 

150,000 every two weeks. https://www.nwemail.co.uk/news/18665783.covid-19-random-household-testing-increased---itll-work/

[Bkk Brian]

4 hours ago, Suua said:

Just recently the UK tracked some folks that have the South African strain, which is more worrying with regards to vaccine efficacy. 

They mass tested everywhere these people had been and asked the public in the affected area to get themselves tested.

It's too dangerous not to. 

If the strains are not stopped asap it's not a good outlook. 

It's dereliction of duty to humanity, not to mass test regardless of cost. 

To allow mutations by burying your head in the sand is criminal in my opinion. 

Yea that South African Strain is a worry, they are still in the random testing process to discover how widely it has spread

 

Broxbourne in Hertfordshire and seven other parts of England will undergo mass door-to-door testing after random checks found 11 cases that were not linked to international travel.

The Government's rapid scaled-up testing is an effort to find "every case" of the variant, with everyone over 16 in the targeted areas urged to take a test, whether they have symptoms or not.

https://www.hertfordshiremercury.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/south-african-covid-variant-latest-4955383

 

[DavisH]

6 hours ago, meltonpie said:

Could you clarify if the excellent epidemiologists are carrying out genomic sequencing?  I note someone asked a question about the UK variant.  Is Thailand drilling down to find what strains are present?

 

Its a bit odd to compare Bangkok to New York at this time.  Everyone is well aware of the nightmare issues New York has had.  Surely no one would want Bangkok to experience the same problems?  If that can be prevented that must be a good thing.

 

If there is one city in the world that takes Covid seriously now it is New York.  The number of cases will be, to a large extent, determined by the number of tests.  You can see here how testing is taken seriously:

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-testing.page

 

and here how reporting is taken seriously:

https://projects.thecity.nyc/2020_03_covid-19-tracker/

 

If you were to track back to the start of the pandemic, New York (like everywhere else) was in denial and ill prepared for what was to come.  If case numbers in Bangkok were to grow in a similar exponential rate to NY the impact would be truly devastating.

Doing more mass testing seems prudent.  The only possible argument against it is cost.

That relatively small cost will be insignificant compared to what it might become.

Thailand will NEVER have the numbers that NY or many other US cities have. They do not isolate most of those infected with the virus, unlike Thailand. You would recall a frat house in the US where all of the students were infected. There were out in the street, unmasked, and having fun. This is the way in most countries. Self-isolation does NOT work. This shows complete isolation greatly reduces the speed of spread of the virus. 

[DavisH]

2 hours ago, FarFlungFalang said:

Australia currently has less burden of disease and overall quite similar being only 7 places from Thailand on the worldometer list with the gap rapidly closing, and has done 13,218,167 tests with 514,791 tests per million population compared to Thailand which has tested 1,217,873 with 17,422  tests per million population which is quite a staggering difference wouldn't you say Sheryl?It kind of puts your statement into perspective in my opinion.Are you saying that Australia's approach is insane?

I would wager they have NOT tested half of the population, but rather those represent multiple tests on individuals. The vast majoprity of children would not have been tested. The Australian government is way overboard and obsessed with testing. Why get a test ina city with just a few cases and no likely exposure wo know cases? It's insane, as Sherl has already stated. 

[Bkk Brian]

9 minutes ago, DavisH said:

 The vast majoprity of children would not have been tested. The Australian government is way overboard and obsessed with testing. Why get a test ina city with just a few cases and no likely exposure wo know cases? It's insane, as Sherl has already stated. 

There are a number of countries doing this. New Zealand’s largest city prepared to conduct “tens of thousands” of tests to determine the source of the first locally transmitted cases in over 100 days.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/12/global-report-new-zealand-begins-mass-testing-as-australia-records-deadliest-day

 

 

 

[rabas]

6 hours ago, meltonpie said:

Could you clarify if the excellent epidemiologists are carrying out genomic sequencing?  I note someone asked a question about the UK variant.  Is Thailand drilling down to find what strains are present?

Yes, of course. Read my previous post for background. Thailand also works closely with epidemiologists and genetic scientists around the world. 

 

Re: UK variant. Yes, they have sequenced and submitted 3 cases of the  B.1.1.1.7 variant to the GISAID nCoV database in cooperation with other researchers. All three were submitted from the Thai Red Cross Emerging Infectious Diseases Health Science Centre, Chulalongkorn Hospital, Faculty of Medicine, Chulalongkorn University. They were submitted on 2021-01-27(2) and 2021-02-03. Quite recent.

 

That does not mean it's in the general community. They've caught cases of the UK strain in their ASQ system before.

[AmySeeker]

For reassurance - a simple huge mass test of the Bangkok city to check for how much of the covid test is around.

 

Something like 100,000 mass tests in a day (which is pretty standard for most countries now) - would give you a sample barometer of anything sinister going around. 

 

If you only pick up 1 or 2 cases then you can move on back to the current method of only testing the majority if they present themselves to a hospital. 

[meltonpie]

13 hours ago, Sheryl said:

 

A positivity rate of less than 5% is internationally accepted criteria. Above that, the epidemic is not under control and testing needs to widen.

 

The rate in Bangkok -- even with testing targeted to people at particular risk (rather than the indiscriminate mass testing you advocate) is well under 1%

 

Testing is extremely expensive to conduct. Millions of baht are being spent on it currently. What you advocate would run into trillions and for little purpose. From a public health standpoint there is no need to know, to the last decimal point, the exact prevalence in the population. Nor even to identify 100% of cases. What is important is to contain spread. Which is being effectively done.

 

It calls for testing of contacts and of high risk groups. Which is being done. And the extent of testing is being adjusted according ot the positivity rate.

 

When there is not enough testing in an area, people who are infected with coronavirus don’t get counted, and they don’t know to isolate themselves. As a result, these people can spread the coronavirus and cause disease in their communities.

People who test positive for the coronavirus (and those exposed to them) should isolate themselves for two weeks, and contact tracing should be done to prevent the infection from spreading. Without enough testing, the coronavirus spreads “silently”. By the time severe cases begin to surge in hospitals, outbreaks are larger and much harder to control. These outbreaks can be detected earlier—and their severity lessened—by testing more people.

But for testing to work, people need to get test results quickly. When people have to wait many days to get their results back, they may be less likely to keep themselves isolated. By the time a positive test result comes back, therefore, someone who has been waiting many days may have infected more people.

While tracking the number of positive tests is useful, what matters more is the total number of people who are infected—and we can only know this number by testing more people. As more people are tested, the percent positive will go down.

[FarFlungFalang]

6 hours ago, DavisH said:

I would wager they have NOT tested half of the population, but rather those represent multiple tests on individuals. The vast majoprity of children would not have been tested. The Australian government is way overboard and obsessed with testing. Why get a test ina city with just a few cases and no likely exposure wo know cases? It's insane, as Sherl has already stated. 

I would wager that I have nowhere stated that they have tested half of their population so why on earth are you rabbiting on about that.Thailand also has a policy to test people twice to confirm an infection so the difference in testing remains the same does it not?I agree to whole world has gone nuts so why bother testing anybody it's just a common cold virus that circulates the globe annually glad to see someone speaking sense.Sheryl said that "NO" country with similar disease burden tests in those numbers I have provided a clear example of a country that does test those amounts so she is clearly mistaken.

Edited February 6, 2021 by FarFlungFalang

[polpott]

1 hour ago, FarFlungFalang said:

t's just a common cold virus that circulates the globe annuall

Clueless.

[ThailandRyan]

16 minutes ago, polpott said:

Clueless.

And you overlooked the sarcastic nature of the comment, and as you have done in the past only pulled/clipped out what you wanted to quote in order to suit your needs, just like a few others on here do.

 

1 hour ago, FarFlungFalang said:

I agree to whole world has gone nuts so why bother testing anybody it's just a common cold virus that circulates the globe annually glad to see someone speaking sense.

 Here is the whole sentence, can you see the sarcasm just dripping.....probably not.

[Donga]

1 hour ago, FarFlungFalang said:

I would wager that I have nowhere stated that they have tested half of their population so why on earth are you rabbiting on about that. Thailand also has a policy to test people twice to confirm an infection so the difference in testing remains the same does it not? I agree to whole world has gone nuts so why bother testing anybody it's just a common cold virus that circulates the globe annually, glad to see someone speaking sense. Sheryl said that "NO" country with similar disease burden tests in those numbers I have provided a clear example of a country that does test those amounts so she is clearly mistaken.

Not sure what you believe FFF. You seem to struggle with Thailand's performance with Covid, think their data is inaccurate. Are those talking heads on TV each day are part of some conspiracy to withhold numbers of folk with Covid walking around the country because they're not being tested? Then you state "I agree whole world has gone nuts so why bother testing anybody its just a common cold virus", unless this is your idea of sarcasm.

Thailand has shown they can manage each outbreak effectively. They're meticulous with quarantining, contract tracing and daily data. They've never lost control and don't need to do the level of testing of nations that are trying to rein in their huge numbers. The Thais have worn their masks from the onset (and I was there when some of the farangs had to be badgered into it). They take it seriously without freaking out and quietly go about their business. Compare Thailand processes and society discipline with Britain.

I'm in Australia presently, and the response in some states is a disgrace - fear based overkill. The lockdowns and border restrictions of WA, Vic and Qld with their paltry number of cases is pathetic. The level of testing provides comfort but is a luxury they don't need. Thailand certainly doesn't either. One million health volunteers in the villages and migrant quarters more than compensates for testing, testing testing. https://jp.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-thailand-volunteer-idUSKBN23B044

Thailand may not meet Western standards in some things, but they sure know how to deal with Covid.
 

Edited February 7, 2021 by Donga

[Suua]

12 hours ago, Sheryl said:

that is no different from the testing the Thai government is doing

Wrong.....it is extremely different.

The Thai government are test in the thousands....a couple of thousand was the latest comment.

The British government test in the 10-100 thousands.

The importance of eliminating these new strains cannot be overstated.

Very simple.

[polpott]

2 minutes ago, Suua said:

Wrong.....it is extremely different.

The Thai government are test in the thousands....a couple of thousand was the latest comment.

The British government test in the 10-100 thousands.

The importance of eliminating these new strains cannot be overstated.

Very simple.

Thailand has a policy of eliminating all strains and with 4000 now in circulation, probably the best policy.

[FarFlungFalang]

1 hour ago, Donga said:

Not sure what you believe FFF. You seem to struggle with Thailand's performance with Covid, think their data is inaccurate. Are those talking heads on TV each day are part of some conspiracy to withhold numbers of folk with Covid walking around the country because they're not being tested? Then you state "I agree whole world has gone nuts so why bother testing anybody its just a common cold virus", unless this is your idea of sarcasm.

Thailand has shown they can manage each outbreak effectively. They're meticulous with quarantining, contract tracing and daily data. They've never lost control and don't need to do the level of testing of nations that are trying to rein in their huge numbers. The Thais have worn their masks from the onset (and I was there when some of the farangs had to be badgered into it). They take it seriously without freaking out and quietly go about their business. Compare Thailand processes and society discipline with Britain.

I'm in Australia presently, and the response in some states is a disgrace - fear based overkill. The lockdowns and border restrictions of WA, Vic and Qld with their paltry number of cases is pathetic. The level of testing provides comfort but is a luxury they don't need. Thailand certainly doesn't either. One million health volunteers in the villages and migrant quarters more than compensates for testing, testing testing. https://jp.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-thailand-volunteer-idUSKBN23B044

Thailand may not meet Western standards in some things, but they sure know how to deal with Covid.
 

 

That's a good post there Donga and I say that with no sarcasm.

I'm not surprised that you're not sure what I believe as I do write here with much sarcasm but I also take the P quite often so I will lay it on the table for so to speak.I absolutely agree with you about Australia's response to this pandemic and agree with Sheryl that it's absolutely insane and seems more to do with stripping away freedoms than addressing the pandemic or showing the world how proficient it is.I also agree with you about how Thailand is handling the pandemic and most of my criticisms are directed at the shonky (illegal?) government and the media (not only Thailand's media either,I've always been critical of the media in general).

As for masks how many thousands of medical staff have contracted covid whilst wearing them?If you believe they do anything I'm fine with that but personally I'm very skeptical.

As I've said many times here I'm sure I've had covid here in Thailand though don't ask my to prove it as it was way back in Feb/March last year and no chance of getting a test.Which is why I say it's just a common cold virus which means it's a virus that is part of the family of viruses that cause the common cold even though it's effects might be rather uncommon.

I'm quite suspicious of what's happening that we don't know about with the enormous amounts of money involved with the vaccines and their rollout.

I don't take much of what I read in the media at face value as some people seem to and this lack of credence I give to information released by the media or the lack of information like testing numbers may make it look like I have doubts about Thailands way of dealing with the pandemic.

I ask a lot of questions and am willing to engage in the discussion and put forth my arguments and will answer any questions one might ask so I hope this helps to see where I'm coming from.If you need further clarification feel free to ask and I will try to elucidate.As Dr Turner would say "sarcasm is the best form of defence".Basically I don't trust the media.I also tend not to trust a so called government that ranks 104th for transparency and corruption.  

Edited February 7, 2021 by FarFlungFalang