Top doc says keep RT-PCR test amid Omicron fears - 149 tourists Covid positive, 300K register for Thailand Pass

[paul1804]

1 hour ago, IAMHERE said:

149 positives out of 116,000 tests ; I wonder what the rate of flase positives is. Could be not all of those 149 really had Covid-19 and what percentage of them were asymptomatic ?

Yes very true & a good point!

[NanLaew]

3 hours ago, lanng khao said:

To be honest I miss that little knock on the door and finding a tray of food on the other side.

 They knocked? Luxury! Most of my cold deliveries were done by stealth Ninja's who wouldn't even touch the bloody door!

[D M G]

Many TOP DOCS

[MrJ2U]

8 hours ago, webfact said:

He also proposed that people coming from countries where Omicron has been identified should be quarantined for two weeks and have two RT-PCR tests in the first and second weeks.

That will be every country by next week.

 

Hello cheap hotels again!

[Bkktodd]

8 hours ago, NanLaew said:

Everyone that has been squatting in Thailand since last March should be taken to the airport, stuck on a flight home and made to 'run the gauntlet'.

 

OK, not all of them. Just the ones that can't help themselves from criticizing all things Thai. Especially those beating up on the CoE and TP processes that they have never been required to try.

 

Oh yes, and those who are crying about the pubs and clubs being shuttered.

 i give you a 1000 likes on this post !

[Bkktodd]

[thailand49]

He is right? but lets make sure all those illegal migrants get fully tested and quarantine for 14 days are those doing the sneaking in buying insurance for them?????

[pacovl46]

Omicron threatens to come to Thailand? Well, did it call or send an email and for how long is Omicron going to stay? ????

[bangkokbonecollector]

41 minutes ago, pacovl46 said:

Omicron threatens to come to Thailand? Well, did it call or send an email and for how long is Omicron going to stay? ????

It filled out a Thailand pass application, it is still pending.

[unblocktheplanet]

10 hours ago, Pravda said:

Everyone that comes to Thailand should go through one month quarantine ????

21 days, like Hong Kong. And omicron still got in.

[Heng]

It might just be another Mu variant.   Not cancelling my travel plans yet.  

[Luton]

9 hours ago, DLock said:

I agree that keeping the PCR tests is better than ATK tests on arrival - they are too unreliable.

 

Last thing we want is another ban of tourist arrivals, 2 week quarantines or major lockdowns.

 

...but I fear they are inevitable if Omicron turns out to be equal or worse than Delta.

It's about time that posters here realised that the PCR tests are 'not fit for purpose' and are being withdrawn, as declared a few months ago by the CDC in the USA. Politicians in pretty much all Countries know this also. It's utterly remarkable that the fiasco of using these tests (that the inventor Karry Mullis said were not to be used as a diagnostic tool) still continues!....The manipulated FEAR of Omicron means we bring back the tests that are not fit for purpose, does it?....Maybe money to be made somewhere?....Please let's be real regarding health in these times and be better informed and stay sane and enjoy living by avoiding programming.

[gejohesch]

6 hours ago, spidermike007 said:

Top Doc says sacrifice millions of jobs, ruin lives, and keep a timid and cowardly approach to Covid. 

 

Easy for him to say. Tourism will never, ever recover if and when they are taking advice from fools like this. 

True, a return to 2 weeks quarantine for selective countries of origin that would most definitely put a final and big, heavy nail into the Thailand tourist industry, and all the economic activity that depends on it.

[Trvlr55]

8 hours ago, vivananahuahin said:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00425-6/fulltext

contradictory Lancet document

 

Not seeing the concern.

should be the standard to isolate people when during the time they are contagious, which is what the article states ATK does, and NOT the total time they have covid. If they are not contagious, there is zero need to isolate.

Additionally, all accounts so far for this new variant, all cases are listed as "very, very mild". Slight muscle cramps. No serious symptoms, etc. Viruses, like anything else, want to survive and propagate, so new variants many times gives up lethality for survival. This is what happened with the 1917 flu pandemic.

Do we really want to keep the world shutdown, and people out of work, for some mild muscle pain. If so, outlaw ALL exercise, and gyms permanently, as they might be a health hazard. For me, I'm headed to the gym.

 

This is "not learning to live with covid", which is supposed to be where we are headed.

[Meat Pie 47]

8 hours ago, hotchilli said:

To be honest I don't want to ever hear it.

I always get contact less deliveries 

[Virt]

8 hours ago, BadSpottedDog said:

What I've been reading, from this source, doctors, and others, say it's WAY milder. 3 days and done. 
'Symptoms Were So Different And So Mild'

Later in the same article.

 

Dr Coetzee, who was briefing other African medical associations on Saturday, made clear her patients were all healthy and she was worried the new variant could still hit older people – with co-morbidities such as diabetes or heart disease – much harder.

“What we have to worry about now is that when older, unvaccinated people are infected with the new variant, and if they are not vaccinated, we are going to see many people with a severe [form of the] disease,” she said.

[partington]

8 hours ago, BadSpottedDog said:

What I've been reading, from this source, doctors, and others, say it's WAY milder. 3 days and done. 
'Symptoms Were So Different And So Mild'

This rather suspect source you mean:

 

Clearly the effect of all Covid variants differs between different age groups and vulnerability groups. There are not enough patients with the omicron variant to make any valid statistical comparison between this variant and any others and a doctor mainly treating a few children or young adults definitely cannot do so.

Edited November 29, 2021 by partington

[spidermike007]

2 hours ago, gejohesch said:

True, a return to 2 weeks quarantine for selective countries of origin that would most definitely put a final and big, heavy nail into the Thailand tourist industry, and all the economic activity that depends on it.

It is pretty much dead already. They appear to have sacrificed the Golden Goose of tourism, on the altar of fake purity. 

 

Tourism will never revive here, to any meaningful extent. 5 million lower to middle income tourists a year five years from now? Maybe. If that. 

 

 

[happydreamer]

OMG...a new variant.  Lets go hide in our condos for another 18 months

[cncltd1973]

13 hours ago, NanLaew said:

That's a paltry 0.13% that tested positive on arrival since 1 November.

 

That's a safe as it gets

 

Great work by 99.87% of passengers, the airlines and airport staff and the teams on duty at BKK.

 

Well done.

I stopped trusting numbers generated from officials looong ago. Lost track of how many times numbers were plucked out of thin air to guide public sentiment.

99.87% success is excellent, medals all around. But why continue tanking the economy and bankrupting the population? Time to throw the doors open if the population is as vaxxed as they say

Edited November 29, 2021 by cncltd1973

[gejohesch]

1 hour ago, cncltd1973 said:

But why continue tanking the economy and bankrupting the population? Time to throw the doors open if the population is as vaxxed as they say

I'm afraid the "people at the top" are completely out of their depth. It's already difficult enough for well organised countries around the world to chart a reasonable path through the pandemic. Confusion, chaos, lack of precision and clarity, conflicting messages, fiddling the data to suit particular agendas, etc : that does not help.

[Albert Zweistein]

He's telling bullsh1t, most countries are not doing quick,cheap and easy ATK tests but PCR.

[Albert Zweistein]

16 hours ago, Pravda said:

Everyone that comes to Thailand should go through one month quarantine ????

In the Mercury mines.

[starky]

13 hours ago, jacko45k said:

Not good enough.....with pre flight test, double vaccination it should be better. Thank heavens for PCR test on arrival, else we would have 149 out there spreading their foreign disease!

Ah yes hilarious and what if only 100 of them have delta with a mean reproductive rate of 5? How many can they pass it onto in the first week potentially? 

[jacko45k]

1 hour ago, starky said:

Ah yes hilarious and what if only 100 of them have delta with a mean reproductive rate of 5? How many can they pass it onto in the first week potentially? 

Many thousands I expect in the bar scenes of Phuket or Bangkok....that 100 soon becomes 200......

Edited November 29, 2021 by jacko45k

[KhaoYai]

15 hours ago, jacko45k said:

else we would have 149 out there spreading their foreign disease!

You've actually become Thai.

 

Maybe a little late though as the population seem to be slowly waking up to the buffalo jutt they've been fed for so many years.

[DavisH]

10 hours ago, Luton said:

It's about time that posters here realised that the PCR tests are 'not fit for purpose' and are being withdrawn, as declared a few months ago by the CDC in the USA. Politicians in pretty much all Countries know this also. It's utterly remarkable that the fiasco of using these tests (that the inventor Karry Mullis said were not to be used as a diagnostic tool) still continues!....The manipulated FEAR of Omicron means we bring back the tests that are not fit for purpose, does it?....Maybe money to be made somewhere?....Please let's be real regarding health in these times and be better informed and stay sane and enjoy living by avoiding programming.

The PCR test was beign withdrawn to be modified so it could detect other kinds of virus/flu. In no way is the test uneliable or unfit for purpose. PCR is the gold standard for detecting sars-cov-2. 

[TKDfella]

17 hours ago, ukrules said:

Taking a casual glance there at first I thought I was looking at a map of Africa and the locations of this new variant instead of a model of the virus...

 

The general shape is really quite similar.

 

Ha, yes. I had to look at the date but it clearly indicated November and not April.

[Virt]

19 hours ago, DavisH said:

The current PCR test can detect it due to the S-gene drop out.

Here in DK we have 9 people that was PCR tested positive and now awaits the results from full genome sequencing, since docs suspect it is the omicron version, so something in the PCR result should indicate if it's something different.

[alyx]

On 11/29/2021 at 11:02 AM, NanLaew said:

Everyone that has been squatting in Thailand since last March should be taken to the airport, stuck on a flight home and made to 'run the gauntlet'.

OK, not all of them. Just the ones that can't help themselves from criticizing all things Thai. Especially those beating up on the CoE and TP processes that they have never been required to try.

 

Oh yes, and those who are crying about the pubs and clubs being shuttered.

But...I just came back ????  and squatted 29-2-20 until 19-6-21