Transcript of the above video:

I have actually had this question posed to me a lot over the past couple of weeks and I thought I would go ahead and make a video about it because candidly the media has been clutching their pearls breathlessly talking about the pandemic. I don't mean to make light; people dying is never good; disease is not good; I am not saying that but I do think and I have been quoted many times on this channel, and made an entire video on this topic that frankly the media really needs to be held accountable in many ways for in my opinion sensationalizing this whole issue to say the least. I understand. There is not a lot else to talk about. There is no economy; nobody is doing anything, so what else are you going to talk about? For lack of a better term I think there has been a fair bit of fear mongering in all of this.

That said, I thought I would go ahead and throw out some raw numbers and also some percentages so people can get a feel for where things are at. So in Thailand this is according to Johns Hopkins University, this is coronavirus.jhu.edu, and this is the Thailand Overview. Confirmed cases - 526,828; deaths - 4,264 and for further edification: total vaccination doses administered - 15,960,778; people fully vaccinated - 3,652,990; percentage of population fully vaccinated - 5.25%. I know that makes some folks, especially in the West somewhat uneasy but I thought that further numbers here were a little bit more revealing. 

From the World Bank, that is data.worldbank.org, the 2020 total population of Thailand according to the World Bank was 69,799,978. Of that 526,828 cases total since March of 2020 have been detected in Thailand. So just to provide a little nuance on this because they talk a lot about cases per 100,000 or deaths per 100,000 and although I think that that is definitely relevant, I definitely think that percentage of the population is also relevant. So in terms of percentage of the population of Thailand, the percentage of the population who have confirmed to have contracted COVID is 0.75% that 526,828 is approximately 0.75% (there is a string of numbers after that if you did the calculation) of the roughly 70 million people who live in Thailand. Furthermore, the total deaths are 4,264. So the percentage of those who have been confirmed to have COVID who have died in Thailand, so that is the percentage of the 0.75% of the total population who have gotten COVID of the percentage of those folks who have died of it, is 0.08%. So less than 1% of population of Thailand has gotten the disease and less than 1% of those folks have died from it, just to provide some nuance. Finally, out of the total population of Thailand if you look at that, the percentage of death, the 4,264 deaths that have occurred, if you put that up against the total population that means as a percentage of the population in Thailand 0.0061% of the total population of Thailand have died from COVID-19 according to the statistics from Johns Hopkins University and the World Bank regarding the total population of Thailand. 

Now this is not meant to diminish the loss of life of anyone. That is not my purpose in making this video and I have done other videos regarding sort of the cost benefit analysis of these kind of numbers with respect to things like lockdown but when people ask me how bad the pandemic is, well I mean define "bad". 4,000 people out of a total population of nearly 70 million have died, approximately 4,000 people. Those deaths are all tragic, don't get me wrong but as I have discussed in other videos, I suspect there are more traffic fatalities in Thailand every year than dying from this. Again, it is not to diminish this but when we look at how bad the pandemic is, I think we have to really drill deep to really understand the magnitude of this or lack thereof.