Covid-19 round-up for expats 1: Should you travel to Thailand?

[Thaiger]

With so much information swirling around the reopening of Thailand and the international tourism and vaccine distribution for foreigners, we thought we’d round up some updates for our readers about what your home country says about if you should travel to Thailand and how they are helping with a vaccine and the Covid-19 situation inside the Kingdom. The information in these reports is mainly about the United States, United Kingdom, European Union nations, and Australia. You can read each report here: Covid-19 round-up for expats 1: Should you travel to Thailand? Covid-19 round-up for expats 2: Will your country give […]

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[Stonker]

 

2 hours ago, Thaiger said:

The UK government issued similar warnings on their Gov. UK site

I doubt their warning was that "similar" to the US's, as the US also gave a Level 3 warning about visiting the UK, also due to Covid and terrorism!

[JamesE]

6 hours ago, Stonker said:

I doubt their warning was that "similar" to the US's, as the US also gave a Level 3 warning about visiting the UK, also due to Covid and terrorism!

Yeah, the warning about the "insurrection" in the south has been on the travel page for a while now (years, maybe). I think this new alert is mostly a CYA so if COVID pulls a US and goes through the roof the gov't could say: "Repatriation my a$$. We told you not to go." Even back at the beginning the only place the US repatriated anybody from was Wuhan and one of the cruise ships. After that it was "tough luck, buddy."

It is kind of disingenuous of them to warn against going to Thailand where the infection rates in the US (unvaccinated population) is still higher than TLOS.

[EdwardV]

1 hour ago, JamesE said:

 

It is kind of disingenuous of them to warn against going to Thailand where the infection rates in the US (unvaccinated population) is still higher than TLOS.

The overall infection rate in the US is 24 per 100K, and in Thailand it's 34 per 100K over the last 7 days. In addition the US rate is slowly dropping while that in Thailand is raising. Not sure if there is some type of distinction since you wrote "unvaccinated".    

[JamesE]

55 minutes ago, EdwardV said:

The overall infection rate in the US is 24 per 100K, and in Thailand it's 34 per 100K over the last 7 days. In addition the US rate is slowly dropping while that in Thailand is raising. Not sure if there is some type of distinction since you wrote "unvaccinated".    

If you consider that about 1/2 of eligible people are vaccinated in the US and that that is the pool of people who are currently getting COVID, then the population for correct comparison is (X/(unvaccinated population))*100,000 where X is the number of cases in whatever period you want to consider (like a day or week). In the US that denominator would be about (very about) 125 million. So (for yesterday, again rounding)  it (15,000/125,000,000)*100,000 which gives a case rate of 12 per 100K. Doing the same thing for Thailand you'd get (4100/68,000,000)*100,000 for yesterday (assuming a 2.8% vaccination rate on a population of 70M) or 6.0/100K. This is comparing unvaccinated Americans and unvaccinated Thais. I think there are lots of caveats to be applied like potential under-reporting, insufficient testing, etc., but those things happened in the US as well as Thailand. I think the worst case is that Thailand right now for an unvaccinated individual is about as risky as the US would be and maybe less because Thailand is still taking it seriously where in the US it's all Happy Days Are Here Again and let's open everything up.