Phuket: Covid-19 cases hit 1,000 a day, health chief denies they pushed for "endemic status"

[webfact]

Picture: Thai Rath

 

Thai Rath reported that new cases of Covid had hit more than 1,000 per day on the sandbox island of Phuket.

 

Such a figure would have been thought unthinkable in August of last year when the island was being proudly opened up to international tourists.

 

Now the health authorities there are even asking the CCSA for the right to turn back Thais who arrive with Covid saying that the health service is under pressure. 

 

Dr Koosak Kookiatkul, chief of public health in the province of Phuket, had several requests after a meeting.

 

Firstly they want to replace ten day quarantine with five and put Universal Protection measures in for the five cut days.

 

Then they want to only report medium to severe cases.

 

In this way they will be able to fudge the figures, suggests ASEAN NOW, by not reporting mild cases.

 

Finally they want to turn back large groups of Thais who arrive with Covid from other provinces saying that they should get treated where they came from.

 

Phuket is not to be considered a place where anyone can get Covid treatment as facilities are limited. 

 

The doctor also denied suggestions that his authority had pressed for the island to be given endemic disease status. 

 

Thailand is in the grip of an increasing number of infections with one leading virologist, Dr Yong, suggesting the nationwide figure will hit 100,000. 

 

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[Geoffggi]

Someone somewhere has been telling porky pies .................LOL - Nothing new in this part of the world

 

[Karma80]

Despite all the calls of various people here to open, Thailand has not seen the impact of omicron yet, or how well its strategy in vaccination, or managment will hold up.

It's only just starting. We're weeks behind many other countries.

What you can be sure of is more uncertainty and changes.

[RichardColeman]

5 hours ago, webfact said:

In this way they will be able to fudge the figures, suggests ASEAN NOW, by not reporting mild cases.

I all seriousness the figures are all being fudged and manipulated in a lot of other countries for various reasons - either to make a country look good or put fear and panic in the populace. Having people die of covid in my UK covid figures that went into hospital at end of their life is just ridiculous. It's like putting the nearly deceased into the bus routes and adding them as a cancer death AND bus related incident !

 

 

[jippytum]

over the previous two months seven people who traveled to Phuket individually all caught covid  .Two friends had to have expensive stays in hospital on Phuket to recover.

The greedy officials in Phuket ignored the warnings from the original sandbox  scheme and don't seem bothered about 1000 infections per day  currently.

It seems evident some provinces are making money from people suffering 

 

[mrfill]

2 hours ago, RichardColeman said:

I all seriousness the figures are all being fudged and manipulated in a lot of other countries for various reasons - either to make a country look good or put fear and panic in the populace. Having people die of covid in my UK covid figures that went into hospital at end of their life is just ridiculous. It's like putting the nearly deceased into the bus routes and adding them as a cancer death AND bus related incident !

 

 

Generally, when the UK PHE figures were given out they were preceded with the comment "Number of people who have died within 28 days of a positive test". This was lazily taken as 'people killed by covid' by the tv/papers. Note that the figure did NOT include those who died 29 days or more after a positive test (but they never mention that bit) - even if they had no other co-morbidities. This method was used consistently throughout the pandemic so at least the figures used have been comparable, even if not to some tastes.

It could be claimed that the UK figures were fiddled because they did not include any deaths that occurred after 28 days of a positive test (rather like Thailand ignores non-roadside deaths when calculating road carnage) and separate figures, prepared by ONS are available for death certificates which include covid as main or secondary cause of death (even if no test had been conducted). Separate figures are also available for excess deaths, which has been another metric used for calculations.

All three methods would produce different results but are any of them 'ridiculous'? No. They are reporting exactly what they say they report and if they get misinterpreted or mis-used, its hardly the fault of the figures.