Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests we are discussing the possibility of Thailand reopening. A rather positive piece of news came to my attention from the Bangkok Post, that is bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: CCSA to Debate Reopening Plan. Quoting directly: "The Government's plan to reopen the country before the end of the year is seemingly still on track as Thailand's COVID-19 outbreak is showing signs of slowing down." Quoting further: "In light of this, the National Communicable Disease Committee, NCDC will ask the CCSA to consider reopening some areas of the country in line with the pledge made in June by Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha to do so in 120 days." Quoting further: "We will now I have to learn to live with COVID-19 with the knowledge that COVID-19 will be an endemic disease confined to a particular country." And that is from Doctor Opas Karnkawinpong and we have seen some quotes from Doctor Opas in the past regarding this. 

But interesting they are using that terminology "endemic disease", I am going to quote directly: "endemic disease". We saw this phraseology being used in Singapore in the past few weeks in their Ministry of Health down there and I have been discussing this here recently about whether or not maybe a paradigm shift might not have been perhaps a good idea. I am not saying anybody is particularly listening to me but I do think this is a positive thing to see this changing from this overall notion of containment, to like any other disease we just need to go ahead and figure out how to deal with it and get on with our lives. 

As noted in other videos made contemporaneously with this one, Australia seems to be making a shift this way as well so I think this is definitely for lack of a better term, a positive development. Obviously the disease is not a positive development but the possibility that we may be starting to see things shift away from this hard line notion of lockdown towards something frankly more pleasant to begin with, to live with, but also frankly more reasonable based on the data that we currently have. It is definitely good to see things starting to shift in that direction and hopefully as noted in this article that we quoted, the Prime Minister of Thailand, Prime Minister Prayut did say back in June ‘we are going to get this thing going again within 120 days; we are going to get basically reopened by October’. It looks like that may be on track to happen. Now exactly how this plays out remains to be seen. We will certainly keep people updated on this channel as the situation evolves.