“I strongly urge the Health Minister to reveal the actual number of new Covid cases” – Thai doctor

A Thai physician is calling out Thailand’s Ministry of Public Health, claiming they are not publishing accurate data on the actual number of Covid-19 infections. He claims that there is a cover up of the real numbers currently being disclosed to the public.

The Deputy Minister of Health Dr Sathit Pitutecha claims that the actual number of current infections is more like 20,000 – 30,000 per day, not the approx., 2,000 or so cases that are being reported daily over the past 2 weeks – a discrepancy of some 90%.

Dr Satit Pitutecha specialises in emerging infectious diseases.

He says the numbers do not reflect the total data available above to the Public Health Ministry and that they are only reporting a section of the available data. He says the daily total should integrate “all patients who have registered for medicine and supportive funding from the National Health Security Office.”

Meanwhile, Dr Thiravat Hemachudha, the Chief of the Thai Red Cross Emerging Infectious Diseases Centre, has backed up Dr Sathit’s claims.

“I strongly urge the Health Minister to reveal the actual number of new Covid cases. It is not the end of the world even if the number reaches 100,000. We have to tell citizens the truth so that they will be vigilant.”

The doctors acknowledge that there is a large proportion of people who are going undiagnosed, partly through being asymptomatic, and partly through deciding to stay at home with mild symptoms and fail to report their status.

The number of reported daily ATK tests over the past month has been in the region of 8,000 – 12,000. Those figures are not included in the CCSA’s daily Covid report. The numbers do not include people doing their ATK testing and not reporting their positive or negative status.

Last month three hospitals in Bangkok reported that they were ‘surprised’ by the number of recent hospitalisations and also cast suspicions on the daily reporting to the Thai media. They also warned about the rising number of BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron sub-variant cases.

SOURCE: TPN