Thailand briefly shows signs of returning to Covid crazy... then backs off

About a week ago there was a report of 10 women who snuck back into the Kingdom by bypassing the official routes and not going through quarantine. It turns out that most of these women (who were working as prozzies in Myanmar) tested positive for Covid and had exposure to the public during the time that they were all traveling to wherever they were going. Some of them were on flights and this of course freaked a bunch of people out.

The media wasted no time making this a much bigger deal than it is (depending on how you feel about Covid I suppose) and got the population worked up into a fervor until the government stepped in and started, once again to tell the news stations what to report.


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Many of these women, before returning to wherever they were actually meant to be going, intermingled with people in Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai - which are both cities in the North of Thailand and are very popular tourist destinations.

There was some speculation that ANYONE who was traveling from Chiang Mai / Rai was going to be subjected to 14 day quarantine before they were allowed to go back to their homes or wherever it was that they were headed if their point of origin was either of these cities in the North.

I have no idea how this rumor got started. I presume it was some government official who has no idea what it is like to be a normal person who doesn't have their own helicopter.

This word spread very quickly on social media and the government keeps their ears to the grindstone and stepped in after a few days with a spokesperson that almost no one has ever heard of to reassure the people that they were not going to be subjected to quarantine for traveling inside their own country.

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His name is Dr Taweesin Visanuyothin and as far as my circle of friends that include Thai people and folks from perhaps a dozen other nationalities, nobody has ever heard of the dude. We are just presuming at this point that he is an actual doctor and that the "Center for Covid-19 Situation Administration" (dumb name for an org) is an actual real thing

Basically the people of the country started to "freak out" again over Covid, the media blew it up to a bigger deal than it really is, the government then took control of the media and then invented this person and his office to re-assure all of us that everything is ok.

This is a good thing I guess because the people of Thailand are already tense enough as it is. The government probably couldn't survive another government mandated lockdown as the people are very unlikely to abide by any sort of ruling in that realm and this is evidenced by the Prime Minister's silence on the issue and the fact that any time someone talks about it in some official capacity it is by a "center" that no one has ever heard of before and the head of it always tends to have the name of "Dr" in front of their name in order to command respect.

Is any of this real? I honestly don't know and really don't care a great deal either. I'm just happy to see that panic hasn't struck the country again.

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