Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing restaurants specifically restaurant customers here in Thailand and vaccination. 

A recent article from the Bangkok Post that is bangkokpost.com, the article was titled: No Jabs Needed for Dining In. Quoting directly: "People in dark red zones will not need to be fully vaccinated and/or pass a COVID-19 test to dine in at eateries and restaurants in dark red zones according to the latest announcement in The Royal Gazette." Quoting further: "The news was published in The Royal Gazette on Saturday, along with the easing of other COVID-19 curbs which were endorsed by the Centre for COVID-19 Situation Administration (CCSA)."

So a couple of things here. The reason I have been kind of slow on the uptake with doing a video on this topic, there has been a lot of talk about the easing of the lockdown restrictions going into September here and the reason I haven't said anything is when I first saw anything about this, staff and I were looking through, well everything starts off in the Thai press obviously and we were looking through the Thai press and we saw this and I didn't see anything about vaccination being required for customers. There wasn't anything I could ascertain from that yet the Bangkok Post which is usually one of the first to, in the English language, go ahead and start talking about what is going on sometimes in the Thai press or just sometimes they find out things sometimes even before or right at the same time as the Thai press. That is neither here nor there, they were saying in prior postings that I had read from Bangkok Post that "oh yeah, customers are going to need to be vaccinated." I hadn't seen anything like that so we waited to get some better clarification and it did come in the form of The Royal Gazette this past Saturday and I wanted to go ahead and quote it from the Bangkok Post because when I first saw it, Bangkok Post had something different so I went ahead and quoted them mentioning The Royal Gazette publication as stating that customers did not need to be vaccinated when dining in restaurants.

I am sure that will come as a great comfort to restaurant owners here in Thailand who have really, to say struggle would be massive understatement. Folks that are in the food and beverage business, truly I am sympathetic. This has been a tough road to hoe especially since April of 2021. Frankly it hasn't been great since last April, since April 2020, but at least up until April 2021 there was some leeway and then April 2021 we had the non-lockdown which was supposedly not a lockdown but they did the alcohol ban which has its own set of problems and I have discussed that at length in other videos on this channel but then on top of that they just shut everybody down entirely and it has been a it has been tough for those folks. So I am certainly happy to see that this is changing now. 

As we have noted in other videos we made contemporaneously with this one, restaurants aren't necessarily out of the woods yet. Hopefully as September progresses we will see a lot of these restrictions get toned down and eased back because quite frankly as we have noted in other videos, there needs to be a cost benefit associated with this. The economy here really has had serious problems and hopefully we can get this turned around sooner rather than later. I think it is rather interesting that people have overlooked the restaurant industry. They just, I don't know it is easy to not think of how much of the economy is associated with dine in restaurants. Even for that matter bars; people don't realize really think of bars as being a major economic engine and yes individually perhaps not, but when you really think about it in the brick and mortar world, and there is still a brick and mortar world, not everything is done online, but in the brick and mortar world, I mean restaurants and even bars they employ a lot of people. It is a big deal. A lot of folks are employed by these kind of places and we have seen the devastation that comes when they are overlooked and when they are shut down and we have seen that since April of 2021. Hopefully we are now seeing the end of this and we can start looking at reopening Thailand to food and beverage business in the near future.