Thailand to reduce quarantine to 7 days, meeting to confirm next Monday | VIDEO

ASQ, changes for people arriving in Thailand. After 12 months of forcing foreign travellers into a 14 day mandatory stay in a hotel, at their expense, as part of the Alternative State Quarantine program… better know as the ASQ… the Thai government have slightly relented in a revised ASQ.

The updated quarantine is a response to immense pressure from the tourism industry to do something, anything… to encourage overseas visitors to come back to Thailand. The update takes into account the current roll out of vaccinations for the coronavirus around the world, the biggest such operation in history. It’s yet to be seen if the reduction in the quarantine will do much to boost the amount of travellers willing to take on a quarantine period and all the paperwork that’s been added to the travel process.

It’s also a gamble for a risk-averse government who will be watching for any rise in coronavirus case numbers. From April, the Thai government is cutting the mandatory quarantine in half, from 14 to seven days, for any foreign travellers arriving in Thailand, IF you have been vaccinated against the coronavirus.

There are a few things to note in the fine print… Vaccinations have to be administered within three months of your departure and travellers are still required to produce a negative Covid-19 test result within three days before departure. If you haven’t had a coronavirus vaccine, but you can produce the paperwork with a negative coronavirus result, you will have to spend 10 days in quarantine.

The revised quarantine program won’t apply to people travelling from the African continent, who will still have to quarantine for the full 14 days. The Health Minister cites the emergence of variants of the coronavirus for this exception, despite the variants popping up in many other places around the world.