While the thousands of inhabitants of these tightly-packed areas might disagree, you should feel free to take up your outrage with the editors of the Bangkok Post.

AFAIK, no one is responding irrationally, save perhaps yourself, rather people are pitching in to control the situation in Khlong Toei, with public efforts to deliver food, administer tests and vaccines.

the governor of Chonburi changed his mind and wants to remove all 15 check points...

This is obviously all relative. As you say, Thailand has been very good at combining active contact tracing with proactive testing and home isolation for low risk cases for every single detected Covid case. The outbreaks in Bangkok (especially in the poorer areas) have meant this has been breaking down for the first time - so relative to how Thailand has been working so far, Covid is indeed raging and out of control. Of course, it's still more in control and being better managed than many European countries and the US even attempted to do at their finest. But that's why you have a 1000x difference in fatalities.

An awful lot of Thailand haters (mainly Westerners here in Thailand) are taking the opportunity to give Surat Thani a good kick for this poorly written declaration, but it's not hard to see the idea behind it. Surat Thani city is struggling with repeatedly uncomfortably high Covid numbers apparently because of a large number of house parties and so they've decided to give the police power to address them for a few weeks. If this is the worst thing that you could ever imagine a govt doing, then you have no imagination and do not watch the news. I have had to remind several Brits declaring this to be the end of possible life in Thailand for them that the rule is a lot less severe than the UK's regulations that you couldn't have anyone around to your house at all which lasted for months.

I do of course agree with you about the risk of indoor gatherings of large groups without masks...
but then why do the authorities not set up reasonable rules about gathering of groups of a certain size or of different housholds.
why do they instead criminalize a houshold of 3 persons drinking a glass of beer or wine together with their food, which has nothing to do with any higher risk to get infected!
this is brainless stupid and hilarious and not to excuse with anything...

Agreed, it is a poorly thought through rule, but let's bear in mind this is a panicked reaction from a small local govt just trying to deal with chaotic situation at the moment. Ultimately it gives the police the power to stop the gatherings which are causing issues and I'm sure families with 2 people who drink will either ignore the regulation or wait a bit before getting pissed.

This is not the Burmese genocide or the new coming of the Khmer Rouge.

I agree about that some European country did not managed so well and stil.

But what you are saying look like you are taking the official propaganda of the Thai government without a realistic view.
At first it was no Quarantine at home until very recently, so citizen preferred to just don't test and avoided to stay 2 weeks in the nice field hospital in case of positive result.
Also if Thailand is DA BEST medical hub, you need to explain me why they cannot handle 2000 cases daily. it's same as Switzerland actually but with 30% less death daily than Thailand. How to explain that ? Wrong number of infections reported or lack of knowledge to manage the infected people ?How do you explain that Thailand had almost not ordered any vaccin for so long, even put a ban to private hospital for importing vaccin ? I did not even talk about the lack of emergency plan to handle the covid surge, or about Songkram and let people travel everywhere.

For many months Thailand was isolated with almost no airline flying to Thailand, some EU embassy also stopped deliver visa because this reason, saying that it was too complicated for going back to Thailand.

During this time Thailand was a perfect place with low covid, but with the porous border for sure it was just delaying the problem...and in the same time killing the hospitality industry.

For you Thailand do a very amazing result, for my Thai gf, it's the total opposite.
Different point of view.

Of course everyone is allowed to judge a country's success as they want. I won't take it away from you or your Thai girlfriend. I will say to the comparison with Switzerland, despite only having 12% of the population they have had over 50x as many deaths. With the differences so unbelievably stark, I struggle to see how people really attacking Thailand's Covid record relative to European or North American countries can be taken seriously.

sorry but you can not compare that!
countries like Switzerland, Italy and certain other European countries have a much much higher percentage of older folks in the population as Thailand
And as a matter of fact, in particular in Central Europe, over 90% of the Deaths has occured among this part of the population
Also the practice, which death counts as a "death due to or with Covid" is totally different. In Europe there were legions of deaths added without even looking properly into the death cause....

Haha why am I not surprised...!

Completely agree with you - "death with covid" does not equal "death due to covid", which seems to be the interpretation in the rest of the world outside of Asia.

If you really believe that Europe has 1000x as many Covid deaths as Thailand because people are older and because of statistical issues with measurement, then I think it's fair to say in general that we won't be agreeing on much involving Covid.

earlier you stated, that Europe had 50x as many Covid deaths and now you are already at 1000x....
you probablv better do your basic math first before we continue discussion...

I didn't though, did I? Europe has roughly 1000x the Covid cases per person as Thailand, meanwhile Switzerland (which is obviously not the same as all of Europe) has "only" 50x as many deaths as Thailand. Mainly because there are far fewer Swiss people in the first place. I think this is just another reminder that we're not going to see eye on eye on things so it's not worthwhile bothering any more.

I think it's fair to say there has been a tendency on the part of tThai authorities to accept statistics that did not fully reflect the death toll. Thais died quietly at home and families were reluctant to allow Covid to be declared a cause of death.

On the other hand "deaths within x days of a Covid diagnosis" was the general criterion for recording a Covid death in europe. So we have one system underestimating direct Covid deaths, the other over-estimating them. The degree of over/over estimation is moot.

It seems clear the sensible assessment of the impact of the pandemic will be excess deaths - mortality above the expected level. This will include those who died because of cancelled operations, delayed diagnosis for cancer and other serious conditions etc.

Thailand appear to have been caught in similar attack of over-confidence as India. India believed it had beaten the virus, Thailand believed it had largely avoided it. Both countries have been lazy on the vaccine front; both were careless about lockdowns. The difference is that disease appears to be out of control in India, while Thailand might be able to stifle it by taking decisive steps to tackle it.

Many deaths worldwide are arising from and due to Covid19 - it could be septic shock, multi-organ failure, pulmonary infections including pneumonia, congestive heart failure, respiratory failure, severe lung damage, pulmonary thromboembolism, severe bronchial aspiration, gastrointestinal bleeding, or heart failure. But the bottom line is that all these are mostly due to Covid19, and without Covid19, the majority of these people would still be alive today. But since the beginning, health officials have warned us that people with underlying conditions are more susceptible to severe illness, hospitalization, and death!

Worldwide Covid related death rate is about 417 per million people, or about one death for every 2,400 people. Current worldwide ranking of Covid related deaths per million capita:

1 Hungary 2,923
3 Czechia 2,748
4 Bosnia and Herzegovina 2,677
6 Montenegro 2,421
7 North Macedonia 2,408
8 Bulgaria 2,541
9 Slovakia 2,176
10 Belgium 2,095
11 Slovenia 2,058
12 Italy 2,020
13 Brazil 1,926
14 Peru 1,879
15 UK 1,871
16 Poland 1,811
17 Croatia 1,791
18 USA 1,781
19 Spain 1,676
20 Mexico 1,674
21 Portugal 1,670

113. India 164

Thailand is currently # 192 with 5 deaths per million people! Bad management maybe, but the sky is not falling yet!