Covid status in Thailand

 

I've not been on this subject lately, how the pandemic theme goes here.  I wouldn't say that it's interesting in the same way Olympics news or space flight developments might be, but at least it might be informative of how that theme goes in other places.  

In talking to people during meetups it often came up discussing their local experience, especially related to my friends living in India, Vietnam, and Germany.  I'll keep this mostly about Thailand.  And I'll not settle into research points much, although all the issues point back towards that context.  I was just talking with Ralph about the new concern that the Sinovac vaccine may not be as effective against the Delta variant, but it seems like there's not enough data to really tell yet, with only one new study mentioned when looking around a bit.  All those details will be clearer as the stats become available, in some cases too late for related decision making, but in general underlying uncertainty is just the typical context for a pandemic.

We're in the middle of what I view as a third pandemic wave in Thailand.  I suppose people could view those larger summary conclusions differently, as any number of different counts of waves.

It almost looks like there wasn't a first wave at all last year, doesn't it?  The one that shut the country down in March through May 2020 related to daily case numbers not so much over 100.  December's second wave, which ran into January, approached 1000 per day; that was much worse.  This plateau is at 8000 cases per day.  At the start of this current wave in April there were still only a few hundred deaths in Thailand from covid.  That number of deaths closes in on a total of 3000 now (2791, as of July 13).  That's a former daily mortality rate in a number of the hardest hit countries.

All the same the country has been closing in stages over the last two months.  Restaurants just closed a week ago, malls the day before yesterday.  Those restrictions aren't stopping the increase.  The faster spreading delta variant is the obvious main cause, but it might not only be that.

About six weeks ago there was talk of the virus gaining a foothold in poorer neighborhoods, where people are crowded together more, where once it became entrenched there would be no way to ever clear it.  I suspect it was far too late before this wave even started, back in March (2021).  Looking back all of March was a flat looking wave; interpreting that is tricky.  It seemed like the virus went nationwide back in December and it wasn't ever going to work to end the spread, as occurred last year.

Onto what life is like here now.  People aren't necessarily panicked, but restrictions do get old.  It was funny talking to my mother about how they were relieved that the virus experience was wrapping up in the US, while case counts and deaths were still far higher than in Thailand, even taking into account the four times higher population level.  They're finally on par now, per person, maybe with Thailand edging ahead.  Or at least that was true prior to the recent uptick in US cases.  

But we are "locked down," probably to a degree that many people never were in the US.  Or maybe it's more similar in both places than it seems; last year people went out once a week, and only once a week, to buy groceries, and you still see people out buying food for that day and the next.  My wife goes to a grocery store a few times a week, and doesn't avoid other errands.  We do work and go to school online; there's that.

in a closed mall (the grocery stores in them stayed open)

A mostly online friend, who I've only met once, is here now, in quarantine to enter the country.  That's unique to only some countries.  Using such an approach Thailand kept the country disease free over the span of time from May to December 2020, by isolating everyone coming in for 14 days, with almost no exceptions.  Then undocumented foot-traffic border crossing is what brought the pandemic back, at first widespread within immigrant communities, but soon after nationwide.  That friend had been in Cambodia, which is now experiencing a renewed pandemic outbreak.

It can be hard to place stats in relation to what might be getting missed.  Thailand has leveled off number of tests at 60,000 per day or so, and up until recently Cambodia's were even at 6500 per day.  Thailand has 8 times the number of current cases, and 5 times the population; it seems worse here.

A recent spike in number of tests conducted there, over the past week, could be a main cause of the case count spike over the last week.  Thailand kept finding new virus "hot spots," places like prisons, manufacturing facilities, old markets, and construction sites, where a round of new local testing would turn up hundreds of new cases.  Or thousands; the prison system was so impacted that for awhile the stats for case counts in prison rivaled those found elsewhere.

It's interesting checking the US daily testing count for comparison; it's at 385,000 now, trending down, but at the last level over a million daily tests were conducted from February to April.  The opposite of what we're seeing here for escalating testing leading to increases in cases could work backwards.  The positive rate just doubled there in the US, under 2% for awhile to approaching 4% now.  In Cambodia that had been holding steady at 15% and in Thailand it doesn't show stats.  I guess if the average tests conducted were just over 60,000 for three months and a daily average was 4,000 (hard to average, given it's upward slope) positive percentage should be in the range of 6%.

This seems to keep mixing between daily life experience and those stats.  The two pair together more than it might seem.  I've had no daily life impact from the case count increasing from 2500 a month ago to seeming to move past 8000 now but the feel of the pandemic depends on those numbers.  If I had been going to malls and restaurants my life would've changed a lot over the last week.  If I owned a restaurant the change could be extreme, maybe the difference between financial losses and bankruptcy, if the restriction stays in place. 

One strange life-experience change:  I started running wearing a mask in the last month.  It's possible to do that; I wasn't as clear on how it would go prior to trying it.  The first day I wore a special running mask designed to hold an N95 mask insert and that was rough, and from there on I just wore the relatively ineffective outer mask part, a kind of thick but open plastic mesh.  Other runners were split on whether to skip the sidewalk and outdoor mask requirement or observe it, which I understand completely.  I was running during the afternoon in over 90 F (35 C range) heat for some weeks, getting the most out of an unseasonal heat wave, some extra heat conditioning training.

Now as we drive around my wife points out more and more areas recognized as hotspots.  Probably all of Bangkok is a hotspot at this point, and soon enough all of Thailand.  The vaccination level and rate is a problem, related to that; about 15% of everyone has had at least one shot, so not so many.

That looks like 4 million "at least one dose" additions to get to the current level of 9 million, and maybe a million and a half more "fully" (or not quite that), so it could be 5 1/2 million shots over a month?  That's a long way to go, covering 70% of 70 million, moving up from 3 million fully vaccinated to more like 50.  The pace will have to change to get that completed this year.

Again the stats side and life experience mix.  Those numbers are a bit abstract but we live out being where we are in relation to them.  My mother-in-law and I have had one vaccine dose, and my wife none yet, so none of us are fully protected.  The country being relatively closed is an extension of all that.

On the cultural side, we don't really have the same type of pandemic denial here.  Some people really aren't so into wearing masks, but even that is more rare.  You have to keep in mind that 2700 people have died here versus 606,000 in the US too; it took about 250,000 deaths there to really get the most opposition-inclined conservatives to give in that there was a pandemic underway.  People here accepted that it was a real threat back when there were 100 deaths; that's why the country was able to eliminate it in about two months in 2020.  To some extent that perspective change is what let it become so widespread now; people know there's a pandemic on, but they don't always care, past wearing a mask and washing hands more.

Last year people made a bigger deal out of being isolated, in most countries.  Not just related to perspective about it, and personal practice; it was more of a thing on a few levels.  As we ratchet up controls and restrictions here we never completely get back to that feel.  Maybe it's just familiar now, or the relative risk is easier to place?

One might wonder, how does all this relate to the generalities one encounters about cultural perspective?  Are Asians, and Thais, really less individualistic, less concerned about personal freedom than Americans, and do they accept cultural norms better?  Sure, but it's just not quite that simple.  On the Thai side perspective on the pandemic is also a personal theme, not uniform across an entire country. 

There's no completely equivalent liberal / conservative divide here, and people move on to basic understanding faster (that there is a pandemic), but perspectives are still diverse.  In the US there did seem to be that split in perspectives, with the liberally oriented locked down hard last year, and conservatives following whatever views and practices they happened to embrace.  In the end it's not as different as it would seem at a distance, since going out and running errands over the past month hasn't felt so different than it did prior to the pandemic, except for the masks and hand washing.  We get it that the disease really is all around us now, so it's a little different, but after a year and a half of that seeming to be the case, at least to some extent, it just seems normal.

I feel bad for Vietnam; this is going to be rough for them (source)