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Bangkok Shutdown: What Is Closed?

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the shutdown of Bangkok and I am presuming that Bangkok is going to effectively go into a shutdown. Some people are calling it a lockdown. I don't prefer to call it that because to some extent it appears that this is going to be voluntary. They are basically asking people to remain inside, to not spread this virus, to sort of flatten the curve as they have called it or I have heard it said, and just sort of remain indoors, try to socially distance, stay away from folks in order to decrease the probability that this thing is going to spread around. The other countries I know have had to go into almost a forced lockdown. Again as I have said, I don't prefer to call this a lockdown per se. It seems to be more voluntary based and folks are frankly acting the way the Thais usually do which is sort of keep calm, carry on and just deal with the situation as best you can under the circumstances. 

So the reason I am making this video is mostly to provide some clarification. So currently we have yet to see the bulk of this actually come down but what we are being told is as of now, we are all aware at this point that entertainment venues, bars, pubs etc., they are all being closed. Meanwhile, restaurants have been allowed to remain sort of open but now it appears that they are requesting that they close as well or go to a delivery only model rather than stay open to allow more social gathering because they are trying to decrease social gathering in order to decrease the chances that this virus will spread. 

So exactly where this is going to be further down the line and perhaps even when this video is published, I don't exactly know. It looks to me like shopping malls are probably not going to stay open into the foreseeable future. I think we are going to see shopping malls probably close here pretty quickly. In fact I have seen news at the time of this video that says that "yeah shopping malls are going to close." Now what constitutes a shopping mall vs. a small store?  It is difficult to make those determinations. Where is the bright-line rule?  It is not really the scope of this video. I think restaurants; we are probably going to see a lot more delivery. Again the other thing with Thailand, there is a lot of street food here. I think we are still going to see street food and I don't think there is much that can be done to stop that nor frankly in my opinion, I am not a medical professional but "do I necessarily think street food should stop? - I don't think it should".  It seems like this virus has a better chance of spreading in confined, closed spaced but again I am not a medical professional. I am not really qualified to make those determinations. Also street vendors do have a sort of take away aspect, a sort of takeaway paradigm to the way they operate their businesses so I don't think we are going to see those street vendors going anywhere and as practical matter, I don't think it is possible to round them all up anyway. 

So the thing to take away from this video is a lot of things it seems are going to be closed at least for a while, a couple of weeks until it looks like the beginning of April and we are going to go ahead and deal with it as best we can moving forward.