^Correct.
The control and discipline I observed in the province, during the initial phase of the pandemic last year, was far better than I have seen in Europe. In terms of not catching the virus, I felt much safer in rural Thailand than I do in Germany. The home quarantine was also well organised and doctors from Bangkok were sent to rural areas to oversee the process. If you catch the virus and have severe symptoms then chances of survival are better in Germany but it's still better not to catch it.
It will be Bangkok and the larger cities that will be having the disaster in Thailand in my opinion.
It's sad to see that countries which handled the virus situation quite well last year are experiencing 2nd or 3rd waves now. Even western countries like Germany, France, Italy, Canada are/ have experienced recent difficulties.
In PH/ PI, during the 1st wave we had 3-4,000 cases per day, highest was in August, I think (when we lifted some restrictions).
Then we had slight easing of quarantine rules & travel during the Christmas season, especially for those coming from overseas (mostly overseas workers & Filipinos living abroad). Hotel quarantine was only 2 nights, testing done at airport. After that, they were allowed to go to their provinces/ families, where they were supposed to do home quarantine.
But many ppl didn't, which led to pockets of outbreaks in some provinces (example, the Cordillera highland region - where Baguio city is located). Then they exhibited symptoms & tested positive at day 6 or 8, when they were supposed to be quarantined at home. Instead, other ppl partied, attended family reunions & went on tourism to neighboring towns, spreading the infection. Some ppl also brought with them the variants (UK & ZA), then we also brewed our own P3 variant.
On the last week of March, the govt implemented another hard lockdown in the NCR-plus area (National Capital Region = Metro Manila plus 4 surrounding provinces). That was for 2 weeks. Now we're on slighly looser lockdown (MECQ/ orange/ Tier 3, etc). At the peak, the numbers reached 12 to 15k new cases per day. Now it's down to 8-9k cases per day. Like in India or Brazil, it's hard to get a hospital bed (much less an ICU bed). People have died outside, in the waiting tents. Some people go to 7 or 8 hospitals just to be admitted.
Sometimes being rich doesn't make a difference. There's a case of a famous former singer, Claire dela Fuente (she was in her 60s, but was famous in the 70s to 80s) - she was well-off but had to go hospital hopping & couldn't be admitted. She had a heart attack (was hypertensive) & died while in the waiting area (tent) outside.
Here, you have to be politically connected to get admitted to hospital. The presidential spokesman, Harry Roque, was admitted immediately, despite the shortage of beds for ordinary people.
Take note that the dire situation is in the Manila-plus area only. In the provinces, things are more normal, aside from using masks or face shields (indoors).
In early March, there was talk of slowly reopening the country, but that has been shelved due to the recent surge.
Re: vaccinations, only around 1 or 1.5M ppl have been vaccinated. PI has ~110M ppl. It will take some time.
If we look at history, the 1918 pandemic lasted ~3 years. We've just finished year 1. It's sad to see the cases in India, Brazil, Iran, TH, PI, etc. Sad also to see the economic losses.
Keep safe, everyone.
Last edited by katie23; 26-04-2021 at 01:49 PM.
^ Katie, so far it appears Phills has got Sinovac, and AZ via the COVAX scheme but only limited amounts and as you have said at the current rate it will take some time. Nice to hear from you again.
Yes, this virus is not going suddenly to disappear. In fact, with a much larger world population than 1918, there are more opportunities for it to spread and mutate. While I have no time at all for anti-vaxxers and pandemic deniers I do think that there will come a point where the majority agree that we just have to allow people to get out and earn a living. These lockdowns are enormously unfair, especially to the young, and they are only stopgap measures.
Except that China seems to have used lockdowns very effectively. I haven't seen a lot of people celebrating their apparent success. Of course, for China like for the rest of us, the virus is still out there, just waiting to spread. Look at India, quite recently they were rather smug about keeping things under control. Not so now.
Thailand's pandemic future remains uncertain. They sort of locked down a bit, in places, for a while. My own feelings are that they didn't lock down hard enough or broadly enough and that the virus is widespread already while the hospital capacity was never designed to handle the numbers of patients it is likely to see.
Ironically, if you remember back a year, there were stories of nurses in private hospitals losing their jobs as medical tourism evaporated. A friend of mine has a partner in Phuket who lost her job as a nurse when the private clinic she worked at shut up shop. There is a lot of medical care capacity in the private sector that maybe the government should be engaging with.
As if the private hospital industry is going to let their investment be cluttered up with Isaan Thai unless the government is prepared to pay for each bed and medical care.
Are the nurses in the Private Hops chosen for their looks or their professional ability?
There will likely be a need for care, the field hospitals are really only triage stations, they cannot treat the seriously ill there. Plus the optics, the government is going to look bad if there are people seen to be dying outside hospitals. Plus the impact those stories would have on Thailand's soon-to-boom-again tourism industry. So the demand side is there.
On the supply side, some private hospitals have next to no customers at the moment. I went to Aek Udon hospital recently for a routine medical - because they were offering it at a discount - and the place was empty but for the nurses. The hospitals could easily reconfigure some of their wards for Covid patients.
It should not then be beyond the wit of man to bring the demand and the supply together.
As you say, the government would have to pay something. For the hospitals, some revenue would be better than nothing. A deal could be done.
The next question is how will the government pay for it. The opposition has been suggesting that the money is running out, even as the government announces B300bn to support the economy. (Smoke and mirrors, 240bn of that is out of the 1 trillion already decreed and as yet unspent.) Public debt in Thailand is capped at 60% of GDP. We might see that cap raised soon.
State preps B300bn for new measures
Thailand's currency is strong in the region for the simple reason it allows capital inflows but obstructs outflows, and restricts debt by curtailing public expenditure on social welfare infrastructural programmes with the result the debt to GDP ratio is a very healthy 57%, probably half that of those developed nations who ensure their populations share in the economic wealth of their societies.
The Establishment here are not about to risk their own fiscal stability and given the supine, compliant and constrained nature of Thai society I should imagine they will get away with that meaningless and arbitrary 60% cap which in truth is impossible to maintain in a global context.
Debt is an economic tool of all sovereign states and it is serviced by any number of ways, mostly by means of government bonds issued over whatever periods.
Once the pandemic recedes in economic impact, say, in two years, then the expected boom as recovery kicks in globally will restore wealth.
The baht has been too strong, culturally maintained by its post 1997 learning curve, and needs to devalue to take advantage of the recovery.
According to its own datasets........
Beds and nurses probably
In my experience( not much) the doctors worked partly in private clinics, private hospital and some did work in government hospitals too.
Am I wrong in assuming that some of the private hospitals are focused on other "business" , ex. cosmetic operations etc ?
Would they have ICU ?
If I use danish numbers, 25% of the hospitalized patints are in ICU and of those 60% are connected to ventilators.
Ofcourse they should use the idle hospitals
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