I think this was always going to happen and I think that most of the world agrees with me when I say that this is a good thing that the government is finally admitting that they cannot control this virus.
I am on the side of people that feel that this entire thing was blown out of proportion and that there was a certain part of the world's population that really wanted Covid to be a big thing. When you start looking at things like how many people die of all causes in a normal year compared to how deaths have been in the past 2 years you find that for the most part, the overall number of deaths are around the same yet the way in which people have categorized the death is what has changed. It is tough to find graphs about this sort of stuff because it really does look like a global conspiracy. I don't want to be one of those guys that spends all their time worrying about these kinds of things because my opinion wouldn't matter anyway even if I did have the proof.
The one thing I do know is that I know a guy who unfortunately recently passed on from a battle with brain cancer that he has been fighting for 4 years, when he died if they found Covid in his system as well does his death get put in the "Covid" category? It wouldn't surprise me if it did.
The Thailand Tourism minister recently stated in an interview that no matter what happens in the next 15 days, Thailand is going to re-open for tourism. This notion was started first announced by the Prime Minister, who basically gets to do whatever he wants anyway so it shouldn't be much of a surprise that the Tourism and the Health Ministers both agreed with the PM, they want to keep their jobs I would imagine.
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There are other provinces that are slated to reopen on the 15th of October and from what I have read, this date is set in stone no matter what the next month holds. This doesn't mean that just anyone can rock into Thailand though, this is just for people that are vaccinated and even then the country is going to have measures in place that is going to make tourism probably not a great deal of fun.
They throw words like social distancing around and I can assure you that this will not apply to the rich, and will be sporadically enforced at first and then after a while it will turn into a situation of whether or not the business in question has paid off the police - just like everything else in this country.
One thing I think the government could do to lower the number of Covid cases in this country and this would work in other countries also would be to stop making it the news of the day. Singapore stopped reporting the number of new cases and supposed deaths and life has improved dramatically there as a result according to people I know that live in Singapore. The rest of their strategy didn't change at all, they just stopped talking about it.
I have said since a while ago that I believed that the media was a big part of the reason why people were so worked up about Covid and if they would just shut up for while things would get better. I suspect we will see something along those lines when Thailand reopens for mass tourism.
From what I have read the new system will not have any quarantine inside of a hotel room, which was the case in the past but visitors will have to choose a "starting point" which will consist of a city or an island or something along those lines and they will be required to stay there for 7 days. I don't know how strict the enforcement of this will be but basically they can go and do whatever they want inside of a certain area.
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Masks at the beach... what fun!
I can't really imagine places like Bangkok being very much fun if you are required to stay a certain distance from one another but honestly, I don't think something like that is really enforceable in a city as densely populated as Bangkok.
I think this is fantastic news for most people. For me and basically everyone I know I would rather face that chance of an early death than to continue living as a prisoner. Hopefully the entire world starts to take this approach before too long.