Why has Thailand performed so much better than other countries in
containing the virus?
When the novel coronavirus
began its swift spread from China in mid-January, people in Thailand — the
favorite destination of Chinese tourists — feared the worst. Thousands of
Chinese visitors had come into Thailand in January, including some 7,000 people
from Wuhan, then the epicenter of the viral outbreak.
In the following weeks, the country waited for the other shoe to drop. It didn’t.
With the country
decompressing and people returning to work under “new normal” conditions, a
question many are asking is why the other shoe didn’t drop. Why has Thailand
performed so much better than other countries in containing the virus?
True, Taiwan and
Vietnam have a better record than Thailand, with the first recording 441
infections and seven deaths and the second 327 cases and no fatalities. But
Thailand’s record is nothing to sneeze at: 3,083 infections and 57 deaths, with
a 96 percent recovery rate.
This becomes
starkly evident when one compares the explosive rates of infections in the US,
Europe, and Brazil. Germany is one of Europe’s best performers, with its 83
million population not too far from Thailand’s 70 million — yet Germany’s
181,288 infections and 8,498 deaths are of another order altogether. And in
Asia, if we go by the numbers, Thailand has done much better than Japan and
South Korea, which are often written about as success stories.
An exhaustive
study of why Thailand
has managed to do better than most other big countries will probably not be
available for some time to come. While waiting for that, let me take the risk
of proposing an explanation stemming from my observations while stranded in
Bangkok at the height of the pandemic, and from knowing something about a
country I have followed over the years.
No comments:
Post a Comment