Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing this overall situation; we have been talking it about regarding the possible re-imposition of quarantine. Something I noticed in some of the things we have been researching during reading on this stuff but in a recent article from the Bangkok Post bangkokpost.com, "Test and Go" country list to change.

But I thought this was really telling because they were quoting the Chief of the Centre for COVID-19 Situation Administration operation base and they were talking to him and basically this sentence stuck out to me. "If the risk of further infections is considered high, the scheme may be suspended completely." We have done other videos on the possibility of suspension of "test and go" but my question is, when did infection become the issue? I thought the issue with respect to this overall situation was whether or not people were dying. In the past, a year ago, a year and a half ago, that was the issue. It was "oh man this thing is bad and it can kill people so we need to do what we can to mitigate people dying." Yeah I understand, you don't want to create a situation that propagates or causes people to get sick, I understand that but I mean to me this whole notion that we need to look into serious restrictions on travel into the country especially at a time when tourism is just starting to sort of bounce back, what little bounce we are currently seeing but bounce it is, it is good to see tourism starting to sort of rebound. The question posed is are infections especially with this Omicron situation where we are seeing data worldwide, I mean out of South Africa we have seen things from their Public Health Authorities which have said and I am not going to get into quoting all this stuff and I don't even want to go that deep into this because it is not really within my bailiwick but, where they have said "hey yeah it is more transmissible but it is far less lethal", and it is my understanding that it is kind of the nature of the beast when it comes to viruses, they become more transmissible over time but they become far less deadly. The question posed first of all and I posed it in other videos is: "In a cost benefit analysis, is the wholesale evisceration of the economy worth the "benefit" of a few less cases or just less infections especially if "infections" might be asymptomatic and we are seeing that they are far less lethal?" I am just basically posing the question "when did infection become what we were fighting off?" I thought we were trying to mitigate substantial suffering and death, not so much just infection, just numbers of infections.

Again I don't particularly know the answer to that but I do think and I think it is worth asking, "Why has infection become what we are looking at?" It seems like for lack of a better term, the goal posts on this have consistently moved where it started off and it was death and now it is infection. I mean if you go back to mid-March 2020, would policy makers have put Thailand through this; gone through a lockdown, if we were looking at the same data that we are looking at now with respect to Omicron.