Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, it is kind of an opinion piece, we are discussing "should Thailand be held hostage and held hostage by what?” Well by this whole situation. All of this pandemic situation; and quite frankly I think one could say the Government response to the pandemic.

This is just one man's opinion but last year I really got the feeling that Thailand was taking a Thai approach to dealing with all of this and frankly in 2020, I was not thrilled by having to go through all of this. My opinion is just one person's opinion but yeah I do tend to think that a few people seem to be on the same wavelength with me, I will put it that way. That said, it felt like it was much more of a Thai approach to things. In recent months, it seems to me that sort of international notions have crept in to certain policy aspects of what we are doing here with respect to the Government response to this pandemic situation. What I mean is I just don't think notions of “COVID Passes” and this constant operating by Decrees that change very quickly and have tremendous impacts on the economy down to the basic level; the SME economy of Thailand, it looks to me based on going on 14 years I have lived in Thailand, this is foreign, I hesitate say influence but this is a foreign paradigm in my opinion and I don't know why. China is China. They do what they do but the Western World in my opinion has just gone hysterically insane and in many jurisdictions that were once very reasonable in how they dealt with situations and operated to try to find the best way forward using a cost benefit analysis, they have just lost that and I don't understand why. Countries, I am not even going to name, blaming and naming and shaming, that is not the point, I will just say the West. There are a number of jurisdictions in the West that I think have just really gone off the deep end and I don't even know what wavelength they are on. What makes me sad is one thing I love about Thai history, and I like to think that I am pretty up on Thai history, it is one of the reasons that caused me to become a Thai is Thailand always looks to her own self-interest and does it well. I have always enjoyed this about Thai history. You go back to the turn of the 20th century, going into the 20th century, you had some very well executed strategy that was utilized to essentially for lack of a better term, evade colonialism and it was done really well; it was done quite skillfully. When you look back on that arena of history, that part of history out this way that was not done easily. There was a great deal of nerve and intellect that was needed to navigate some really choppy waters at the time. Then you get into the era of the World Wars and again Thailand navigated that very deftly. At the end of the Second World War, especially out here in the Pacific, things were not real great but in my opinion Thailand came out of that probably as good as any country in this part of the world could have expected to come out of that. Then you get into the Cold War era and again Thailand forges its own path and in my opinion made the right moves. It wasn't exactly non-aligned but it sought its own national self-interest and it executed it capably. You are hearing me preach to the choir; I have the fervency of the converted as they say. What worries me now is that these Western notions with respect to lockdown which to me, and we have gone over this in other videos, there does not seem to be an overabundance of data that supports the notion that there is any efficacy to these really Draconian measures. What we do know is they have a devastating effect economically, we know that. That is just clear. You can see it anecdotally when you walk around outside here in Bangkok.

The point I am trying to get at is maybe it is time to at least some degree for Thailand to look at the situation herself and maybe try to determine her own path based on her own analysis because quite frankly it has worked in the past, and I think it can work again. Just as a for example, and I have done a video, I have been pretty clear I am not a fan of this so-called “COVID Pass”, and all of this nonsense but we are going into September, we are looking on the horizon this may be a possibility but something that just didn't make any sense to me, a recent article from the Pattaya Mail, that is pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Thailand's Tourism Ministry aims to reopen whole country by next January. Quoting directly: "Minister Piphat Rachakitprakarn said Bangkok was scheduled to reopen in October, as part of the second phase but this phase has been delayed to November as the majority of residents will not receive their second vaccine dose until the end of October." Well as we have noted in prior videos on this channel they are bringing online supposedly what is going to be a system which will require those for example dine-in restaurants in Bangkok to present documentation that they are vaccinated. How do you do that if they don't project this to be possible until November? So why bring a system online that is only going to detrimentally impact the economy that here in September, we are doing without it, so why do we need that in October? My question. To get to the bigger point, I am going to go ahead and put some data up here. I did a Google search, just a basic Google search on the population of Thailand and we will go ahead and throw that up on the screen. You can see it. It is from the World Bank and it says the population of Thailand is 69.63 million people, approximately. Okay, let's just presume that. I went ahead and went to Johns Hopkins University and the web address for that is: coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality, and for Thailand: total cases 1,265,082 and then total deaths, you have got 12,631 or a total mortality of 1%. Then deaths per 100, 000 - 18.14. So, the reason I bring this up is we went ahead and did the math and we said okay 1,265,082 against Thailand's total population, that brings it to 0.0181686342. So 1.8% of the population of Thailand has come down with COVID. That is what is recorded and there is a difference between what is called case fatality rate and infection fatality rate. Cases are things that you know about somebody is infected. Infection fatality rate is where they try to surmise how many infections probably have occurred that they don't know about and then they take that against how many people have died with it. So there is a different thing to look at there. We are just looking at the case fatality rate here. And case fatality rate usually is a higher number; usually, I am not getting into statistics here. It is our understanding usually it is a higher number than infection fatality rate but as noted according to Johns Hopkins, so 1.8% of the population has contracted COVID that is what is on record. Of that number, so that is 1.8% of the total population, then of that 1.8%, 1% has died from it. 

The point I am trying to make and just to compare, again we have got this from Johns Hopkins University - United States, I am not going to go through all the data, no point to it,  but there deaths per 100,000 is 197.45 and then you compare that to the United Kingdom, and I think that is a more accurate comparison because demographically it is much more similar to Thailand albeit it is not geographically similar, and I often wonder if cold weather maybe has something to do with all of this but that is just my own speculation. But 199.72 deaths per 100,000 in the United Kingdom against Thailand's 18.14. Again, I am not trying to belittle any of these numbers; I have been accused of that before. That is not my point. My point is 1% of 1.8% of the total population have died from this in Thailand and yet we are making major changes with respect to just the basic liberties that Thais are used to having. Meanwhile and this is what actually scares me more, it is the notion of being hostage to this whole thing. What I am talking about here is, I am here to tell you having discussed this with clients and with folks that are in the business community here in Thailand, it is not so much the lockdown, it is the uncertainty of how many more lockdown are we going to have, if any. I have to say, coming out of this latest round or the early dawn, after coming out of the dark night of this past summer here in Thailand of this lockdown, if another lockdown is forthcoming, I don't know how the economy comes back. This is not me trying to express an opinion. I really can't figure that one out because the biggest thing that I have surmised from what folks have told me is it is the uncertainty. A lot of people have said, "If I had known the way that this was going to play back in March of 2020, I would have just shut down my business then, I just would have been done." I know many businesses that probably may not reopen at least not initially coming off of the latest lockdown because they don't know when it is going to end; they don't know when the next one is coming. Having that kind of Sword of Damocles hanging over the economy perpetually, that is a problem because an economy needs confidence and we can't regain that kind of confidence until we are reasonably well assured that we are not going to have to deal with this again. Again I don't know what the answer is precisely but I think we have to start thinking about this stuff moving forward.