The lessons of the crisis in Thailand

Well, I've learned I'm not bored easily. And some people's patience is not as broad as they think.

I gotta say, that I am proud of the way that the Kingdom has handled this plague.

Ruffian Dick wrote:

Well, I've learned I'm not bored easily

That's an interesting point ! Actually I've recently viewed a video about that, as I was bored

Thank you for your feedback and have a nice day

Cheers

Loïc

Actually, my lifestyle on Ko Samui did not change at all from 2019 to 2020.  Same morning coffee locally (although for a few weeks the cafes were closed), same late afternoon at the beach.  Never wore a mask except to get into Makro.

Strange that now, when many restaurants are opening up in Thailand and elsewhere, here on Ko Samui they are not opening up, and there are very few people in town.  Probably because the Thai staff have all moved back to their families elsewhere in Thailand until the next tourist season (Nov., Dec.). 

However, I did notice that friends answered more of my emails in the last few months than normally.  They had more time, being under house arrest (I refuse to use the prison jargon 'lockdown').  But now they're back to their busy life, so I'll get many fewer emails in response to mine.  Hard to keep up with friends elsewhere when you live in Thailand and people know that they may probably never see you again in the flesh the rest of your life.  Outta sight, outta mind.

Hai, Thailand is recovering very well with this crisis.Hope foreign tourists will come back soon to Thailand may start in October like that again with more health measures so keep safe for themselves and keep others as well.Because tourism industry in Thailand facing lost since three months and hotels and airlines are close and all people connect with tourism industry suffering with huge job lost.

I hope for resume soon in coming months in Thailand as of cases are low but keep safe when tourist starts again in Thailand.  Regards  Anil Kumar Upadhyaya Investment consultant

My time with CV19 , I shall remember to thoroughly question everything being feed to us by the media, as it is they that caused this unnecessary plannedemic.

My staff were interesting to observe in that they are young in their careers, relationships, mortgages, finances. Their primary concern was "are you going to close the company" or "are you going to sack us" and the answer was no. We have enough work until next year. Many of the opening hours questions were undefined as with bars clubs massage the order was to close. However, as a law office we did not fit into any category and so we followed the rules of the Pattaya Court. They did not close and so we remained open. In the first month where we were locked out by road blocks, I used my work permit to pass them to work.  I did allow them to work shorter hours or every second day as long as the work was done. All had computers and smart phones to do work anywhere. Many government offices were closed to. The Land Office was closed and this was disruptive. WE did 5 funeral services over 1 week and getting the docs we needed from overseas and here was difficult. We could not send documents out of the country as the EMS system here was shut down. Thankfully, people understood this. Normally friends and relatives would fly in to the funeral, however there were no flights and so we would live Facebook the events, video tape them and cloud them. The ashes we shall send later when planes start flying again. None of the deaths were CV related.

Some staff had to go far away to see their families, as the way the media was telling it we were all going to die! and in their immaturity they easily frightened like children and wanted to go home.

We did plan and went shopping as I was not afraid of the virus but rather the supply chain breaking down, effecting food, water, gas.

I had hours to have a cooked breakfast at home and read up on the CV19. The more I read the more I realised that the numbers didnt add up and now a few months into it this is becoming the truth in that more people died from other causes like cancer, car accidents, malaria etc. However the media kept beating the drum and whipped the masses into hysteria. The downside of all this is that companies and businesses are ruined and never to return. People bankrupted, this flows on to hardship in the families and pressure on the children. For many years to come there will be deep psychological problems for here and there are no systems in place to handle this. More problems will come as the last few months disruption have cause a financial crash that will be worse than 97 and 2008.

We are fortunate and have secured staff that will get paid, we also support our families here and overseas, we also give to the various charities here as there are food and water queues that go for miles everyday. However we can only do so much and more hardship is just around the corner.

On the home front the house got a lot of things done, with many old things replaced, a new water storage tank was installed as our area has no water, and the dry season is approaching.
A chance to cook again. Decorate and fix small things that should have been fixed months ago.

I found Spotify and worked away to many tunes I thought lost. They have cataloged them and it was a pleasure to hear them remixed and sounding more wonderful than on my old systems 40 years ago!

Also surrounded by doom and gloom there was Netflix and so binge watching a series or re watching something was well worth it.

The social distancing was not applied evenly and a few of my friends were "busted" and fined 45,000 baht for sitting to close together and another foreigner was fined (50,000 baht) for going on the beach. At the moment no beach access or fine 100,000 baht or a year or 2 in jail.

I think the Government did what they were told to by WHO manuals, as this event had not happened before and no one was really sure and merely followed suit. You can see now that 56 deaths were no where near projected figures as the virus fades.

Lastly, many house spent on research and reliable sources on info regarding the CV19. The fear and panic of the second wave, the fighting with people and their comments online, the conspiracy theories, Government decisions that changed from day to day, all added to the frustration.

One thing is certain and that is that " we are not going back to normal" see MIT here https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/0 … 18-months/

Good luck all

lol
you should write for the comics! Plenty virus in Thailand! Reason Thai's do so well is because of their daily nasal irrigation which kept most of virus from their lungs allowing natural antibodies to thrive and destroy this virus! Thailand is rich in antibodies now and could do well making plasma vaccine

Living in a tourist destination like Samui, it's difficult to balance the reaction to huge queues for food hand-outs,  the exodus of workers back to their home towns /villages, and massive unemployment.... against the positives.
Social distancing, as a voluntary self-discipline, is simply not evident in many public places. It seems against basic human instincts in supermarket queues, food markets, and any vehicle transporting construction workers. This, together with one of the world's lowest testing rates (tests per million population) doesn't fill you with confidence about the number of cases being reported.

Some positives, though, at the cost of jobs,...
the beaches are quiet (no social distancing problem there), while some restaurants are surviving on skeleton staff (or the owners have been putting in some manual labour effort).
Tracking apps (e. g Mor Chana) are easy to use, and wearing a mask isn't much bother.

I miss the pubs a bit, but a couple of months without them isn't a big deal. When they re-open, I can't imagine they'll be conducive to indiscriminate social mingling, at least for a while.

International tourists?...
-well, I guess they'll be back in their dribs and drabs after mid-year, but many will be discouraged financially, having missed a few months of full pay, and others will just be fearful of the risks of travel. Some others just won't be able to afford the extra time involved in quarantine, when returning to their home country.
Maybe we need some bilateral treaties, with the likes of NZ, S. Korea and Taiwan (lower COVID risk) , for quarantine-free travel, but this needs to be reinforced by agreements to test travellers (and, no, I don't mean just pointing some malfunctioning body temp gun at them).
These treaties / agreements need to be more with countries we can trust, and less with countries in whose pockets we sit!

The "new normal" might start in the fourth quarter of this year. Just hope the hatches have been sufficiently  battened down to protect us from a second (winter) wave.

My situation is different in as much that I am in the U.K. waiting to return. I have been here since 14th March and virtually since I arrived have been in a lockdown situation, so nothing that I was intending to do within the first view days happened and all these weeks just surviving and watching the news unfold.
Here the fatalities are around 36,000, vastly different to the number in Thailand which if accurate are under 60.  So perhaps there are lessons to be learnt time will tell, and sadly its not over yet, I am just pleased that despite the frustration of being in a country that has suffered so much loss, the health authorities here, the National Health services, have in general been ready to cope with a mass outbreak that has occurred albeit the lockdown was too slow in happening. Which I think has cost lives.
Keeping up with the news in Thailand as I do via the internet I cannot understand why the Baht is still so very high, that combined with the devastating effect this epidemic has had on tourism and businesses small and large cannot be a good combination.
Here there are still no indications of flights out to the Kingdom until early July which feels a long time off still and then I am hesitant to book until knowing the international airports en route will be open and very importantly what medical clearance documents will be required not to mention health insurance, not to mention any quarantine restrictions.
So everyone is in limbo, nobody knows if the slight relaxation of the rules allowing people to mix more and the gradual opening of public areas and businesses will bring a second wave which will bring another tightening of the rules again.  There has never been a time quite like this, lets hope the governments will assist financially to see people through to what will be called the new future.
In the meantime there has been much thought and programmes relating to this via the radio and t.v. but I am not so sure that despite all the lessons we might have learnt from this terrible time those new promises we make to change our lives and ways will be no more than the new vows we make every New Years Eve. only to break them before the the end of January!  I hope I am wrong!
Best wishes to all.
John
(Deep in darkest Warwickshire).

We, being an elderly, retired Swiss couple, decided to repatriate from Chiang Mai to Switzerland. Developments on world politics and politic of Thailand re farangs lead to our decision. We consider the future for us outside Switzerland as dim being retireds without a strong substancial financial background. The dream of having good life for less money is an illusion.

Had stopped going to the regular fresh vegetables and wet market for weekly / monthly supplies and instead started using branded food outlets and found with a little higher price, the items were better packed, more hygienic and of a assured quality - each item in a pack! Hence, will stay with the new habit.
Miss the foot massage specially after a hard day's work and look forward to their opening hopefully soon.
With such few customers for the motor cycle taxis always leave them with an extra 20% or so.
Miss making and offering home made food to the Monks as family does not allow outings.
However, keep looking for avenues for I firmly believe 'the pleasure of giving' is far greater than of receiving.
Overall find the Thai culture quite remarkable and 'humbly accepting' the new challenges we all face.
Stay Safe & Stay Positive

Keep the faith! It will get better! I am retired in the Philippines and it is pretty cheap! Have you thought about that! Bohol is opening up soon and is a great place to retire and live very cheap and easy to use ferry's to see many other close by islands with some of the finests beaches in the world! English spoken everywhere and very friendly helpful people! Hope to see you there!
Dennis
from California orginally

P.S.
Zermatt is my favorite place on the planet! First time I climbed Cervino from the Italian side when i was 17! 73 now! Climbed the Matterhorn from Zermatt at 18 and spent 3.5 years in Italy and always visited Zermatt every winter and summer! In 1978 I was a contract surveyor working on laying out and construction staking for the towers for the cable car lift! Scary job but great experience!

***

Sorry to hear that Pattaya had such anti-beach regulations/police.  Across the bay here in Ko Samui, I have been going to the beach every sunset, and there are several dozen people - only Thais wear face masks (but hell, they did that before this year!).  And no police at all.  That's why I live in Ko Samui - a paradise away from the controlling police who always find new ways of taking our money from us.

A WARNING ABOUT COVID19:

It seems "gloom and doom" but the truth is never nice except it helps you think more critically and prepare wisely for the worse... More lockdowns are forseen for the near future ...
Here are excerts from those that knew better and done their researchs:

***

Lockdowns were administered with little consideration that they might not only cause economic devastation but potentially more deaths than COVID-19 itself.
If this virus behaves anything like the pandemics of the past, expect it to linger for a couple of years, not just a few months. The lockdowns actually guarantee that this situation will drag on for quite some time.
Lockdowns not only did not help with the containment of the disease, but lead to even greater suffering as a result of the "economic devastation" they encouraged. Things like the impending economic depression leading to mass unemployment, business failures, rising poverty, then food shortages and lack of basic necessities.

***
We cannot live our lives behind closed doors in our homes until the elites tell us, as though we were children, when we may go out in the yard.
Note that Sweden, which decided not to implement a lockdown like everyone else, fare no worse. In fact, it's on the path to “normal” while the rest are bracing for a second recurrence with added economical and social devastation.

Past pandemic history:
If you look at the 1950s, we had the Asian flu. In the 1960s, there was the Hong Kong flu. These were worse than this pandemic. Also, look at the story of swine flu in 2009, which began exactly the same as coronavirus. A new virus originated in Mexico. There was no vaccine so it was very frightening. It spread all over the world. It infected one billion people. A quarter of a million people died. But there was no lockdown, no Ferguson, nothing – people were far more interested in the economic crisis that hit a year before in 2008. They did not have time to give attention to this nonsense.

COVID19 whether accidental, intentional or staged, but well taken advantage of ("never let a crisis go to waste" - the mantra of the "deep state") may seem a last ditch effort to put the blame for the pathetic state of the worldwide financial and political crisis we're already deeply into.
In other words, the death and destruction from the draconian measures enacted to defeat the coronavirus, which never came remotely close to being as deadly as the experts predicted it would be, will prove deadlier than the disease itself.
Yet instead of being afraid of bad decisions by bad government officials, we continue to heed their advice, while believing that the coronavirus is responsible for the mayhem.
It is not, no more than it was ‘responsible' for the destruction of our civil liberties. We did that all by ourselves through our passive consent.

lasvegan wrote:

Keep the faith! It will get better! I am retired in the Philippines and it is pretty cheap! Have you thought about that! Bohol is opening up soon and is a great place to retire and live very cheap and easy to use ferry's to see many other close by islands with some of the finests beaches in the world! English spoken everywhere and very friendly helpful people! Hope to see you there!
Dennis
from California orginally

Well ... Over there, anyone under 21 and over 60 are not allowed out of the house.
Not even to buy food at the supermarket because they won't let you in without their "gestapo-like" pass. You're OK if you have others not in that age range but for the majority of foreigners, like some of my friends, they're mostly alone. It's like culling the weak and sick off the healthy herd. "Trust" those uninformed bureaucrats to take care of you with their murderous policies.

Icosini
I understand what you are saying! But the reality is not as you mention! Where I am is ground zero in the Philippines! Quezon City! We have the lockdown and EGCQ and yes it is problematic! But in the Philippines the people always find a way to continue living as well as one can expect! The under 20 and over 60 has stopped almost no one! The police do very little boots on the ground enforcement of orders such as those! Guards at store entrances rarely stop anyone! Yes teenagers are not allowed to run around and fort Filipino's obey social distancing! I am 73 and with my Barangay pass I am allowed to go and come as I please! I have went to the SM Mall across the street 4 times this week alone and my 60 year old Filipina girlfriend goes out daily! We don't abuse our ability to do these things and obey law enforcement when out! We pass our law enforcement people whom know us by name and are not asked for our passes which we now wear laminated on a chain around our necks! The only real difference is we can't travel out of the bngy with out a travel pass which can be gotten at the bngy office! And no mass transportation available! but easy to hire a private car and go! So in reality your assumed because you read it online or were told by friends who probably may be part of a small group who are being held to the letter of the law but for 99.9% go about our business! Duterte withdrew his order for seniors who live alone to stay home and not go out for or meds as it was inhuman! You might want to stop spreading the bullshit until you got the facts!

Hello,  Loïc,

Changes to my life during the Corona Virus scare?

I have lived in Chiang Mai for quit a while by now.
In reality, not much changes to my life caused by the virus things.

Even though I started to:

1-Wear face mask when I am out and about.
Previously, I have never been a mask-wearer at any time.

2-Started to carry bar soap in my pocket when I go out.
I  have always been a keen hand washer.
And I have  carried  water-filled plastic bottle  & clean towel in my shopping bag all the time.
In addition, I started to carry a small piece of soap with me since I have learned Corona Virus is easily killed by the soap bubbles.

3-Wipe up door knobs and the floor with the bleach-soaked rags.
Previously,  I have not used bleach for floor sweeping.

4-Finish my grocery shopping before 8pm.
Today's Thailand  has quite a few 24/7 outlets including public markets.
But night time curfew cut back their trading hours.
So I  had to do  my shopping  in accordance with that.

5-Enjoy more frequent bargains  at the retail giants.
Since consumption level in Thailand shrank  2-3% in the past few months, stores like Tesco Lotus
started to offer more frequent discounts.

Regards,  J.M.

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