People are still terrified of Covid in Thailand to the point where if I leave my house it involves putting hand sanitizer on a least a dozen times between my front door and doing some shopping. The mall is open and this is where I pay all of my bills and get some other shopping done and each and every square inch of that place smells like alcohol gel as do all the people. I comply because I am not trying to make a stand or cause problems but this seems like overkill for a virus that has almost not chance of killing you and is at least for now presumed to be had by almost no one in the public in Thailand.
However, we reach the pinnacle of lunacy as far as the requirements to "stop the spread" when I got onto an Air Asia flight to Phuket a few days back.
I'm exaggurating with that photo, the flight attendants now are just wearing those N-95 masks and have hands so covered in gel that I'm surprised they don't drop everyone's delicious bottles of water on the ground (no cups anymore! because that's how the 'Rona gets ya!)
Social-distancing is enforced in varying crazy ways throughout the airport but since airports generally are quite crowded they do seem to be very selective about where this is actually taking place. We can't space people apart 2 meters from one another in the security line, it simply isn't going to happen and therefore it doesn't happen. But one thing did happen that was especially stupid during my boarding.
Unlike what would normally happen where everyone jumps up to try to get on the plane as soon as they possibly can and completely ignore the announcements. Now they are enforcing row-by-row boarding and at least to some degree, the people are listening. They only board 3 rows at a time and this normally starts out pretty organized but people arrive late and screw up the order and eventually the organized line becomes a mob of people all crammed together.
I took another flight about 3 weeks ago where the conditions for flying were even stricter and people were forced to spread out at the check-in area and then something magical happened on the jetway.
You might recall that most medium sized or small passenger aircraft only have one door and when you have 300 people that all need to get on that plane any idea of social distancing is going right out the window. So we had to increase the amount of time by around 3x in order to stay a safe distance apart from one another only to be crammed in like sardines on the jetway. Of course once you actually enter the plane you are, as you usually would be, packed in as tightly as the airline can possibly get you in order to make the trip financially worth the airline's while.
It just seems so stupid to me that they even bother with social distancing at all since there are some places where this isn't going to be possible and one of those places is on an airplane.
They did away with a lot of the silly rules like not allowing carry-on bags and strange queue-ing policies that don't make sense since everyone is going to get log-jammed later anyway but one still remains. When we are departing the airplane we have to do so 3 rows at a time and then march off the plane down the stairs and then we are all crammed onto a bus shoulder to shoulder. Forget the fact the these same rows of people were right next to the row behind them just moments before but what the 'ell is the point of having us walk off in groups only to have all of those groups be bundled together again on a bus?
I would imagine that this is probably not the airline's call and it is just another rather silly rule that we are forced to adhere to in order to be given the luxury to pay to fly somewhere but honestly, how can anyone look at this situation and feel as though anything is being accomplished at all? Hopefully we will return to sanity before long.
