Phuket drops outdoor face mask requirement
Wearing a mask in outdoor public spaces will no longer be a requirement in Phuket province, effective from yesterday, June 1. Medical or cloth face masks will still be required to be worn indoors, in crowded spaces and in badly ventilated spaces. The mask requirement – indoors and outdoors – is still in effect in all other provinces around the kingdom, for the meantime anyway.
In Phuket only, people may remove their masks at the beach, public parks, sports stadiums and other public areas, but are urged to keep a social distance of 2 metres at all times.
Last week, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Public Health Kiattiphum Wongrajit announced the ministry would drop the mask mandate, in outdoor spaces, in “certain areas” of Thailand to begin with. The ministry said the mask requirement could be dropped in areas with a low case numbers of Covid-19 cases, a high vaccination rate and “medical preparedness”.
Currently, Phuket is the only province where the outdoor mask mandate has been dropped.
As for the rest of Thailand, the ministry said people could expect the outdoor mask mandate to be dropped around mid-June. However, just two days ago, a spokesperson for Thailand’s PM Prayut Chan-o-cha’s said “the government has no plan to allow people to remove face masks because it is necessary to prevent the spread of Covid-19.”
SOURCE: Dailynews
