Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the notion of "risk" in the context of tourism into Thailand. I started thinking of this when reading an article from The Nation, that is nationmultimedia.com. Quoting directly: 'Test and Go' draws over 23,600 tourist applications. This small excerpt in here, I urge those watching this video go check out that article, but the small excerpt I thought it was interesting. I want to comment on it.

"The Test and Go" scheme, aimed at bringing tourists back into the country without spreading risking the spread of Covid-19, had been launched on November last year, but was paused a month later when the Omicron variant of the virus started spreading." They go on in this article to note that things are reopening and the new "Test and Go" scheme is already drawing in a number of new applicants. The excerpt that I thought was odd was: "aimed at bringing tourists back into the country without risking the spread". Well look, at the end of the day I think we are all going to just need to get over the fact that there is inherent risk associated with tourism. While I can understand the argument behind why we did what we did back in March 2020 under those circumstances, we are not there anymore. We know what this is, the situation is what it is and we are going to have to at some point and we are already seeing Public Health officials talk about this in the context of describing this as endemic and moving on with easing restrictions and basically just getting on with our lives.

But I just kind of wanted to make this video because it is this whole, I don't know what you want to call it, but there seems to be in sort of the collective consciousness a meme out there of being able to get to some magical place where there is no risk of anything. That is just not possible. I think anybody that really looks at any given situation for what it is understands we are never going to get to a position in Life or in a Public Health context for that matter, now I am not an expert on that but I am just speaking commonsensically, I don't think we are ever going to get to the point where we are going to see a zero point risk factor for anything. So what are we aiming for in talking about risk this way? That is my main question. I don't even particularly know the answer to that question other than I think people sometimes get caught in a feedback loop as to what their goal is and it is sometimes very difficult to come out of that feedback loop. Hopefully as we are seeing the momentum shift here in Thailand, things are progressing toward an outlook of "hey we are going to need to learn to live with this", hopefully we are going to see this paradigm put behind us.