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As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing "cases" becoming the metric. The reason I was thinking of this came from a recent article in the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Daily Cases May Hit 100K by Songkran. Let's stress some language here. "MAY" hit and also "CASES" not deaths, cases. Quoting further: "COVID-19 daily caseloads could top 100,000 (could) by the Songkran festival in the middle of next month in the worst case scenario." (I mean I really love the way the media has sort of done some of the reporting on this. It is like saying "lightning strikes up 10% because 10 total people around the world died this year and the usual number is nine." I mean you can kind of frame anything in any way you want,) "according to the Department of Disease Control." Quoting further: "Whether the level of infections will drop or intensify in the weeks ahead depends on how strictly COVID-19 precautions are adopted." And again I really have to question some of that because if these precautions work so well why haven't they worked. The reason I thought of this, I was watching the film Moneyball the other night for anybody who is familiar. It is a movie about baseball. It has got Brad Pitt in it and Jonah Hill. It is basically about a General Manager who is trying to change the paradigm of how recruiting is done in baseball and he is doing it from a much more data centric approach and it just kind of got me thinking about this whole situation. There is this line where all the scouts are talking about how great a swing somebody had, "oh, he has got a great swing!" And he says "Well can he hit?" "Yeah, he is coming along." and he says, "Well if he can hit, why doesn't he hit good?" and he is looking at the data and says, "well if he can hit, why doesn't he hit good?" and that has sort of been my thing throughout this whole issue is if these precautions worked, why didn't they work good? I mean that is kind of the way I look at it. 

Meanwhile, again back to cases. The reason we got stuck under all these Draconian restrictions and these restrictions have had a substantially impact and still are having a substantially negative impact on the overall economy, I mean we have still got truncated opening times for various venues; we have still got all kinds of restrictions associated with what people can do and under what circumstances, and I frankly fail to see in most cases how they are anything other than cosmetic at this point under many circumstances. Moving away from this article where it is talking about cases I thought this was very interesting, also from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com article is titled: Shift to 'endemic' forecast within 4 months."Kiattiphum Wongrajit, Permanent Secretary for Public Health" (let's note this again, Permanent Secretary for Public Health) "said the fatality rate in the current Omicron wave is significantly lower than during the previous outbreak." Well the reason we started doing this was the fear of substantial deaths; well going back to the beginning nobody knew what it was. I have said before and I will say it again, I think reasonable people can say, "hey when you didn't know what it is and there is a chance of substantial death, maybe some precautions are in order, some inordinate ones." I don't think we needed to go as far as we did but let's leave that aside. With respect to this issue where again from the Permanent Secretary for Public Health says "the fatality rate is significantly lower" and then everything now is about cases, my question is why the narrative shift, why the paradigm shift? Okay, I think reasonable people would say if eminent death may be a prospect or widespread casualties or something, maybe some precautions are in order but when in history, in all of humanity, have we substantially upended our lives because of illnesses. People get sick, it happens in this world. Now if an illness rises to the level of a plague that is killing everybody, yeah that is a different scenario. But where we are in a situation where I mean 100,000 cases, well how many hundreds of thousands of colds were had in 2014; how many tens or hundreds of thousands of cases of the flu occurred in 2014 here in Thailand for example. I don't have that data in front of me and frankly I am not an epidemiologist; I am not a medical person, I am not saying that but my point is this has had a substantial impact on the legal rights and people's just basic prerogatives for a substantial period of time now. Two years we are coming up on now. The promulgation of the Emergency Decree will have happened 2 years ago, I believe March 26th. 2 years of our lives have been paused; 2 years of our economy has been put on ice and it was because of death, it wasn't because people got sick. It was because of the prospect that lots of people could die. If that isn't the prospect then isn't it time to move on?