Thailand’s come a long way battling Covid-19 since September

With the rise of the highly-transmissible Omicron variant and our duty to report new developments in the spread of Covid-19, it’s easy to get a doom and gloom vibe from the news. But looking at the big picture in Thailand, deaths, infections, and hospitalisations have been steadily decreasing since peaking in August.

So. to celebrate the new year, The Thaiger looks back at the Covid-19 data over the last 4 months of 2021 from September 1 to January 1 to see that, while we’re not out of the woods yet, Thailand has certainly come a long way since the middle of 2021 when Covid-19 rampaged through the country, sending death rates soaring and governments scrambling to lock down the country and contain the virus.

Perhaps the most heartening visualisation of Covid-19 progress in Thailand is a look at the daily deaths in the country. They have fallen 95% from 252 Covid-related fatalities on September 1 to just 12 yesterday. While there have been various spikes along the way, the mostly downward trend may soon see deaths from Covid-19 in Thailand dropping to the single digits. It is hoped that the Omicron variant, which appears to be more transmissible but milder than other strains like the Delta variant, will not bring an influx of fatalities as well.

Every metric of Covid-19 has been steadily decreasing for 4 months in Thailand, as our daily snapshot shows, with daily infections falling about 79% in 4 months from over 14,000 to around 3,000 per day now. ICU patients have also fallen about 88% and those on ventilators down about 85% as well.

While daily infection numbers are way down, one of the very few Covid-19 statistics that has worsened since September is for a good reason. With the country mostly sealed off, the number of infections coming in from international arrivals in September was often in the single digits each day. Now with the reopening (that has subsequently been reined in), the first 2 days of 2022 has seen nearly 150 Covid-19 infections coming in from abroad each day.

At the beginning of September, there were about 167,000 people in hospitals or receiving some kind of medical care for Covid-19. That number has fallen about 80% to around 33,000 today. Those in hopsitels or other similar medical facilities have fallen a similar 80% while the 804 people in home and community isolation represents about 1.3% of the 64,000 people in isolation at September’s start.

Tourist provinces have had a bit of a rollercoaster as the sector begins to open but popular areas like Chon Buri and Prachuap Khiri Khan seeing some upticks. Many tourist areas saw a rise in Covid-19 infections in late November, though it’s also worth noting that many provinces have industrial areas where work camps see spikes while touristic towns are relatively unaffected.

Covid-19 vaccinations have tapered off from the government’s peak rollout push in late September and early October. Booster shots were relatively rare in September when they were primarily given to medical and frontline workers and those requiring them to travel abroad. But now they have become a heavy focus of the government’s vaccination effort, especially as reporting continues to show that 2 doses of most vaccines is not very effective against the new Omicron variant, but a booster shot for most brands has been found to significantly increase the protection from Omicron.

SOURCE: CCSA