Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, it may be a little bit confusing, you know, "a negative reaction to travel restrictions easing?" Well let me get into it. I decided to make this video after reading a recent article in ASEAN NOW, aseannow.com, the article is titled: Overall negative reaction to Thai Covid-19 center, majority of business owners, tourists want much further and faster easing of restrictions. Quoting directly: "Bangkok, Thailand-following a major meeting of the Center for Covid-19 Situation Administration in Bangkok, March 18th, 2020, the overall reaction online and from business owners has been tepid at best and outright negative at worst. The Federation of Thai Industries (FTI) and the Thai Chamber of Commerce have both stated the changes are not enough to encourage wider foreign tourism and travel." They go in further detail in that article. I urge those who are watching this video to check out that article.

They going to further detail in there about the various permutations of this easing and I have got to tell you just on a personal level I have an overall negative reaction to the fact we are even still dealing with this stuff. I really don't get it at this point. There is this supposed timeline to consider this endemic. Meanwhile, all the metrics are saying this is fundamentally over at least at the very tail end of the ending. Most of the major, not major, but most of the other countries in this region have rolled back virtually if not all of their requirements. They have just basically said, "Yeah we are done with that!" In most of the rest of the world, this is all rolling back and meanwhile it seems that we are in some sort of bureaucratic feedback loop; some sort of quagmire if you will keeping us in the current state of affairs. Look, I have said it before and I will say it again. In comparing the different jurisdictions around this region, and let me be clear, I am not saying Thailand needs to get on the bandwagon with everybody else. Quite frankly I would argue that maybe doing that in the beginning might have, or maybe not doing that at the beginning of this might have saved us some heartache, but let's leave that aside for the moment. I am not saying just because all the other countries are doing this we need to do this but from the standpoint of comparative tourism destinations, it is a heck of a lot easier a decision to go to a country that says: "yeah just come on in; get on a plane, come on in," than a country that says: "well you need to go ahead and go through six layers of online digital bureaucracy, forms, document uploading etc., etc., etc.” I mean we don't need to be doing that and it is putting tourists out. Tourists aren't going to want to do that and it is going to cause numbers to remain stagnant, if not drop further. So I hope and I agree with the Federation of Thai Industries and Thai Chamber of Commerce, we need to encourage wider foreign tourism and travel and the best way to do that is to ease these restrictions further. I would go even further and say, it is getting to be time to start really thinking about just disbanding this all together, being done with it. 

Now I understand that this notion that this gets treated as endemic, that seems to be or at least it is sort of the implied finish line to all of this. Now whether or not that is the case remains to be seen but I think it is getting to be time at this point to just put this behind us.