Jungle Drums Were Silent
It was a heart stopping moment, to be told that someone exposed to covid-19 was living about 100 metres away from our house in a tiny village of just 45 houses. Normally, the jungle drums around here are very active and they can transmit messages within seconds of hearing or generating news.
This time, it took the drums over a week to share this news. In the meantime, goodness knows how many interactions there have been between the contacts and the rest of us, bearing in mind that the contacts own and live in a building with a shop attached. Hundreds, if not thousands of interactions in that week have possibly taken place.
That was a week ago, so about two weeks since the exposures happened and, touching wood, no one here is reporting any sickness.
Foreigners Out
The other aspect of this is the moratorium on foreigners like myself being eligible for any vaccination against covid-19: even if I were prepared to pay for it.
Other countries have given vaccinations to everyone and anyone if they were considered to be vulnerable because of age and health concerns. Not here: no foreigner should be vaccinated while there are unvaccinated locals. That is a policy that deserves to backfire. The point is that anyone who succumbs to covid-19 can pass it on to anyone because in the early stages of infection, no one knows they've got it. So, we all go our own way, masked or not, hands washed or not and blindly spread the virus.
Ah! but, you are a foreigner so keep out of our hospitals until we are all done.
Ah! I say, but most of you are not vaccinated either and I am in the vulnerable category so you'd better watch out. Whether I like it or not, whether you like it or not, we are sharing the same air space and surfaces. The virus couldn't care less who you are and who I am.
The moratorium is being ended now. The penny has finally dropped.When I will be vaccinated, though, no one knows yet!
Thailand covid-19 Confirmed Cases
I don't say that all of Thailand's covid-19 problems are because of their moratorium of vaccinations for foreigners by any stretch of the imagination and the graph below shows Thailand's confirmed cases record from March 2020 to August 2021. I am hoping that the signs of a downward trend will continue, for the benefit of everyone.
Singapore
Remember gold standard Singapore? The shining light of covid-19 best practice. Until they weren't. Singapore had an impressive regimen for dealing covid-19 cases in the early stages of the pandemic. Truly impressive. Then the infections started to rise. Then they realised they had a problem.
Then they realised where the problem lay: xenophobia. Like many countries, Singapore relies on what is called migrant labour in these parts. Typically, in this region, such labourers are housed in ramshackle dormitories where 8, 10, 15 people share one room or dorm. They are migrants. Foreigners. Let them take care of themselves.
It bit Singapore but credit to them, once they realised how stupid they had been, they took care of the problem. You can see the bite marks on the graph below that shows the confirmed cases in Singapore over the period March 2020 to August 2021.
DW
28th August 2021
