Chiang Mai cancels Walking Streets as COVID-19 cases rise

[snoop1130]

 

CHIANG MAI (NNT) - As one of the provinces worse hit by the new wave of COVID-19, Chiang Mai province has now suspended the Weekend Walking Street events indefinitely until the situation becomes under control.

 

The landmark weekend walking street events affected are on Wua Lai and Thapae roads, in an effort to reduce the transmission of COVID-19.

 

Once famous attractions for tourists, the province is now afraid these popular walking streets could become a transmission hotspot as many people gather there. The province currently bans events that bring together more than 50 participants, to help limit the transmission.

 

Chiang Mai province is among 18 red-zone highest control provinces with new cases of COVID-19 being reported daily. Right now the province requires any travelers from other 17 red-zone provinces to quarantine for 14 days, install the CM Chana application, and inform disease control officers should they need to leave their accommodation.

 

The Governor of Chiang Mai, Charoenrit Sanguansat has inspected the conversion of Mae Khue Subdistrict Municipality’s nursery into a field hospital for young COVID-19 patients, as the province has seen 16 cases of children aged 4-6 years old being infected with the virus.

 

The governor said the special field hospital should help separate young patients from adults, and help reduce the need to relocate patients.

 

The field hospital for young patients is run by Doi Saket Hospital, with doctors and nurses on standby to respond to any acute condition developing among patients 24 hours a day.

 

-- © Copyright NNT 2021-04-23

 

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[Thailand]

It's coming soon.There will not be a lockdown though. ????

 

I guess I missed it but why are mild and asymptomatic infections not home quarantining? Getting sent to hospitels etc with more  serious cases seems like asking for trouble?

[Thailand]

2 minutes ago, Thailand said:

It's coming soon.There will not be a lockdown though. ????

 

I guess I missed it but why are mild and asymptomatic infections not home quarantining? Getting sent to hospitels etc with more  serious cases seems like asking for trouble?

And separating young children from their parents is surely a recipe for stress and more likely to cause additional problems.

[hotchilli]

11 hours ago, snoop1130 said:

As one of the provinces worse hit by the new wave of COVID-19, Chiang Mai province has now suspended the Weekend Walking Street events indefinitely until the situation becomes under control.

I wonder if the Songkran holidays revenue is enough to subsidise the now out of work locals?

Nice strategy Mr PM.

[CM Dad]

There is not a walking street on Thapae Road.  The one you are talking about begins inside the moat at Thapae Gate and then heads towards Wat Pra Singh.

[Trujillo]

Canceling the Walking Street is not the end of the world, but I think if Thailand wants to steer the ship toward reopening in the next few years, it needs to do two things: Make a better, more realistic risk assessment regarding the virus that causes Covid-19; and make efforts to lower the temperature of fear among many Thais, which has been fostered by not educating the average citizen about the actual nature of the situation. 

 

Case in point: I had dinner at an outdoor stall with a person who continually raised a common cloth mask to her face, looking pensively from side to side. Asked what she was doing, her response was: "I'm afraid of covid." She was, incidentally, not over 70 years old with an underlying medical problem. 

 

You could say this behavior is innocent and doesn't matter, but in fact it's very significant. This woman is doing risk assessment not from facts, but from terror. While the comparison is imperfect, about 50 people have died every day in Thailand since the beginning of the year in traffic accidents (and 2,914 people injured every day). Over the past 467 days in Thailand, 0.25 people have died each day with covid. Which activity is riskier? 

 

Currently, the Thai government is putting every single person who tests positive for the virus that causes Covid-19 in a hospital or field hospital, regardless of whether the person is sick or not. This program necessarily instills fear. Can you imagine if this were the program in the United States, when yesterday over 66,000 people tested positive?  How would that even work (civil liberties aside)? 

 

And according to this article from The Economist (In-clinical-and-real-world-trials-chinas-sinovac-underperforms) 

"THE LATEST results for China’s CoronaVac vaccine, developed by Sinovac Biotech, a Beijing-based pharmaceutical company, were disappointing for the aspiring scientific and technological powerhouse. Phase-three trials, which were conducted on health-care workers in Brazil, yielded an efficacy rate of just 50.7% (with a 95% confidence interval of 35.7% to 62.2%), just barely above the 50% threshold set by the World Health Organisation for covid-19 vaccines. The results of a real-world trial released a week earlier were even worse: the vaccine was estimated to be just 49.6% effective (11.3% to 71.4%) against symptomatic covid-19 cases; when asymptomatic infections were included, this figure dropped to a dismal 35.1%."

 

Yet we have this:

 

"The Sinovac vaccine provides as much as “99.4 per cent immunity against Covid-19 a month after the second dose”, Chulalongkorn University virology specialist and chief of the Centre of Excellence in Clinical Virology Dr Yong Poovorawan said in a Facebook post on Thursday (April 22).

He was citing a study on immunity by the centre and Banphaeo General Hospital in Samut Sakhon."

 

Source: Thai specialist: Sinovac can provide up to 99.4% immunity

 

Regardless of which source you think is more trustworthy, there is a serious messaging problem here. 

 

I want to add a personal note. I want more than anything to get back to some sense of normalcy and I believe that the more facts the public knows, the better. The fact that the public here is either misinformed or ill-informed contributes to the problem. 
 

This is not solely an issue for Thailand; "A recent survey found that more than one-third of Americans overestimate by as much as a factor of 10 the probability a person with COVID-19 will require hospitalization.

Researchers involved in the Franklin Templeton/Gallup study asked Americans in December what 'percentage of people who have been infected by the coronavirus needed to be hospitalized.' The correct answer is not precisely known, the authors note, but the best available estimates place the figure between 1 and 5 percent (unless you are in Thailand, where 100% of those who tests positive are hospitalized).

 

Source: Americans-are-wildly-misinformed-about-the-risk-of-hospitalization-from-covid-19-survey-shows-here's-why

 

 

----------------------------------------------------

vis-à-vis outdoor transmissions: 

 

What the science says: 

 

As Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, told CNN last weekend, “We’ve known for a year that outdoor infections are extremely rare.” Exactly how rare?

• According to a systematic review of peer-reviewed research published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, the odds of indoor transmission are about 19 times as great as the odds of outdoor transmission.

• Not all outdoor environments are equally safe, though: Unmasked interactions that involved prolonged, frequent contact, for example, were associated with higher risk of outdoor transmission.

• “Our takeaway from this is that it’s not impossible to get an infection outdoors, even though from what is published, clearly the proportion of when that happens is much lower,” Nooshin Razani, one of the study’s authors, told The Washington Post.

What this means in practice: “Transmissions do not take place between solitary individuals going for a walk, transiently passing each other on the street, a hiking trail or a jogging track,” Dr. Paul E. Sax, a professor at Harvard Medical School, wrote in NEJM Journal Watch. “That biker who whizzes by without a mask poses no danger to us, at least from a respiratory virus perspective.”

Source (original article has active hyperlinks) -- New York Times: Is It Time to End Outdoor Masking? “We’ve known for a year that outdoor infections are extremely rare.”

"Just one coronavirus infection in every thousand cases occurs outdoors, according to contract tracing data from Ireland.

Data from the Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC), which monitors infections in the Republic of Ireland, revealed that of the 232,164 cases of Covid-19 recorded up to March 24 this year, 262 were a result of outdoor transmission.

The number of infections that occurred outdoors represented just 0.1 per cent of the total."

 

Source -- Evening Standard: One in 1,000 covid cases outdoors Ireland study

 

 

[BritManToo]

Just now, Sticky Rice Balls said:

No sunday walking street--sounds like heaven.....

If you didn't like it, you didn't have to go.

[BritManToo]

3 hours ago, Thailand said:

It's coming soon.There will not be a lockdown though. ????

 

I guess I missed it but why are mild and asymptomatic infections not home quarantining? Getting sent to hospitels etc with more  serious cases seems like asking for trouble?

The COVID infected with no symptoms are sent to the COVID 'prison camp' field hospitals.

They don't get mixed with the coughing COVID cases.

[BritManToo]

33 minutes ago, Sticky Rice Balls said:

I wish sunday would hurry up so i can get pad thai--a fruit shake--a scarf and a wooden frog....sigh! how I miss being squashed by chinese taking selfies of TP gate

The same market is less crowded on Saturday evening at Chiang Mai gate.

Edited April 24, 2021 by BritManToo

[Stargeezr]

Yup on this forum, there are still so many experts that have not caught COVID and spew their vast

knowledge.  I feel so lucky to be in my home country awaiting my 2nd shot.  I just read and am amazed by

Thailand, and its expat experts.   Thanks

Geezer

[Thailand]

46 minutes ago, Stargrazer9889 said:

Yup on this forum, there are still so many experts that have not caught COVID and spew their vast

knowledge.  I feel so lucky to be in my home country awaiting my 2nd shot.  I just read and am amazed by

Thailand, and its expat experts.   Thanks

Geezer

Thailand. Is the country I/we have chosen as our home. I /we sincerely hope they can overcome this dreadful plague as soon as possible.

 

Using ones simple deductive senses one can determine an awful lot of genuine information amongst the dross on TV and although not experts we are probably quite well informed in general.

Pleased to hear you are getting access to the shots. And much the same as another poster here, reasonably convinced that I had the infection around March last year, but no tests to determine a yes or no.