It’s been a long time—in Coronavirus days—since my last update on March 21st. At that stage, we had been in Thailand for just 2 days, and we were staying in a hotel in Trang (we stayed in the only 5-star hotel in this town of 60,000, which is about 500 miles south of Bangkok, and 300km south of Phuket, far off the beaten track for foreign tourists to Thailand).
The main motivation for the move from The Netherlands to Thailand was to buy myself time to finish the expose I want to write on the appallingly bad garbage that has passed for mainstream climate change economics. I still fully expected that I’d get the virus; I just didn’t want it to get me before I “got”, as best I can, Nordhaus and Tol and all their fellow-travellers for their arguably criminally negligent trivialization of the dangers of climate change. I was buying time, but I thought, not health or freedom.
Now, we’re renting a 4-bedroom house in a gated community of about 500 homes on the outskirts of Trang, and the odds are that I won’t get the virus at all.
Thailand is one of about 40 countries that, to use the pandemic diseases expert and complex systems theorist Yaneer Bar-Yam‘s phrase, are not merely “flattening”, but “crushing the curve”: eliminating the virus from within their borders. When we arrived, Thailand’s daily case count was 56 on a 3-day moving average basis, and was still rising—see the screenshot below from the excellent Coronavirus visualisation tool build by one of my Patrons, Nigel Goddard (the blue dot marks March 20, the day we arrived here).
Figure 1: Thailand is recording just 1 case a day now https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/ngoddard/covid19/
Now it has fallen to 1 new case per day, and only one case in the last two weeks was of community transmission: the rest have come from Thai nationals in quarantine after returning from overseas. It is highly likely that Thailand will eliminate the virus entirely this month.
This has been due to strong personal hygiene, stringent controls from a central government that took the disease seriously from the outset and had recent experience of an epidemic with SARS in 2003, and plentiful supplies of personal protection equipment: when we arrived, every morning we’d line up at a local supermarket (with about 500 others) to buy a pack of 4 N95 surgical masks for 10 Baht—or about 10 US cents each.
Figure 2: The standard pack of 4 masks for US$10 cents each
The price was government controlled, but included a 20% profit for the local Thai manufacturer. This experience alone demonstrated to me the folly of the West offshoring production under “globalization”. That meant cheap goods for consumers and large profits for capitalists that no longer had to pay their local workers decent wages. But it also meant that the USA, and the UK, and most of Europe, weren’t able to produce enough masks for their own people during this pandemic, while Asian countries were able to churn them out cheaply, and make them available en masse.
Figure 3: The orderly queue to purchase the masks. People were a bit closer than the 1.5 metre rule, but literally everyone was wearing a mask to begin with
We now have a personal stock of about 25 packs of these, plus alcohol gels and sprays. This would be replicated across Thailand (though not necessarily to the same scale per household). The bottom line is that pretty much everyone in the country has the personal protection equipment (and social practices) needed to drastically reduce person to person transmission of the virus.
Figure 4: Part of our household stock of masks, gels and sprays.
It has certainly been eliminated in the province we’re living in, Trang (in the capital city of the same name). There were 3 cases here when we arrived in Thailand, then 4, 6 and finally 7—all from one family so I’m told, of a 24-year-old who had been working in Phuket.
Phuket is a major tourist destination, and has had a total of 224 cases out of a population of 420,000—or about 1 case per 2000 residents (that’s about half as bad as The Netherlands). The province of Trang has had 7 cases amongst it 700,000 residents—or 1 case per 100,000. The last new case was over a month ago. All the most recent cases have been in Bangkok, a sprawling city of 8 million that I was sure would be a viral hotspot. Instead, it has recorded just 1548 cases: about 19 cases per 100,000, versus 260 per hundred thousand in the Netherlands and close to 400 in the UK.
Figure 5: Bangkok’s total case count at https://covidtracker.5lab.co/en?fbclid=IwAR2FoTEMKOjtADGTM7Bv1EGiqP2-mppEKtpdx9zv9ZO45FM0qi04yxxEAKk
The personal impact of this is palpable. Even though people are still practicing personal caution here, the mood is relaxed: you’re no longer afraid of your fellow human being. I noticed this at a restaurant earlier this week, when the owner came up and clinked glasses with us over a meal. Even a month ago, that was unthinkable. Now, it feels like old times—as in, like six months ago. I wouldn’t even have noted such an event back then. Now, it’s significant. I feel like someone who almost drowned, noticing the air in a way that everyone else takes for granted.
Thailand won’t let this relaxed mood lead to a resurgence of cases, however. It is still locking down provinces—you can’t travel from one to another without a health clearance, a good reason to travel (tourism doesn’t qualify!), and a clearance to travel from the provincial government; you have to scan a QR code when you enter and leave a shop, to enable case tracking; everyone everywhere wears a mask when they are in contact with people they don’t know; and a curfew still applies, but now from 11pm till 4am rather than the original 10pm till 4am.
So, I’m confident that Thailand will get to where Taiwan already is: to zero new cases for more than 2 weeks, which confirms that the virus is not within its borders. There are, according to Yaneer’s excellent EndCoronavirus.org website, 46 countries that are on their way to that state.
Figure 6: Yaneer’s personal profile from the https://www.endcoronavirus.org/ website
They include China, the original source of the virus, which is down to a mere 7 new cases a day in a population of 1.4 billion. It is very much the whale amongst minnows here, in both numerical and economic terms. The next biggest country in population terms is Vietnam, with a population of 95 million—and the incredible success story of having just 302 cases and no deaths. Next is Thailand (70 million), Australia (25 million), (Taiwan) 24 million, then Sri Lanka (22 million), and after that, way down to countries like Norway (5 million). Economically, China is also first at over US$13 trillion, with Australia in second place at one tenth that level.
Figure 7: The 46 countries that are on their way to eliminating the virus completely
Another 25 are “nearly there”. These include most of the countries of the EU, Japan, and South Korea. Of these, both Japan and South Korea look likely to join Yaneer’s winners circle—where they will form a welcome counterpoint to China’s economic and population dominance. Many of the others, I fear, will spark a second wave if they succumb to the pressure to re-open before the virus has been eradicated. That includes Italy for example, which is still recording almost a thousand new cases every day, and the Netherlands, which I left in order to come here, which has over 44,000 cases and about 200 new cases every day.
Figure 8: Countries that are “nearly there”
Then there are the 36 countries where the virus is still rampant—including crucially the United States of America and the UK, which both completely bungled their fight with the virus, and which seem highly likely to experience a second wave of infections after their pathetically managed lockdowns are ended as well.
Figure 9: The “virus forever?” countries?
The worst country may well be Brazil, which seems to be skipping the odds of a second wave by completely failing to contain the first. Cases are doubling every ten days.
Figure 10: Brazil’s cases are doubling every 10 days. See https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/ngoddard/covid19/
So I find myself in part of the world that is virus-free, and watching a New World Order evolve that no-one anticipated—not even Huxley or Orwell. It’s a “fractured planet”, with two enormously disparate fractions: China, Southeast Asia and Oceania in the “virus free” segment, and the rest of the world in the “virus afflicted”. I’m glad to be in the virus-free part, but I do have some trepidation about the future politics of this block, in which China is by far the major power economically and militarily.
Figure 11: The “winners and losers” from EndCoronavirus.org at https://www.endcoronavirus.org/map-visualization
That worry aside, I’m relaxed and working well, though enormously behind on numerous projects thanks to the time I lost in the move. Initially, getting settled here took total precedence: finding a place to rent (we rapidly located an unfurnished 4 bedroom house in a gated community on the outskirts of Trang, for US$300 a month), furnishing it, buying the essentials for mobility in a region where the temperature never drops below 24°C and frequently hits 37°C (a car, motorbike, and bicycles for exercise before the sun rises too high). That took about six weeks all up. It came after spending two weeks visiting my family in Sydney for what I was sure would be the last time for at least a year, after working with Russell Standish on Minsky for two weeks in late February.
All of March, all of April, and part of May was thus lost to the personal impact of the virus. I finally got down to solid work about two weeks ago. So far, I’ve just finished two major tasks with tight deadlines: a chapter for a book on system dynamics modelling in economics, and a paper collating my work on macroeconomics for the Review of Political Economy. With those two out of the way, there’s still a ton of work to do—summarised in part by this “to-do” list:
Figure 12: My current to-do list
My daily routine is a 10-30km bike ride starting somewhere between 5.45-6.30am on the very safe internal roads of this community, then a brief 5BX exercise routine at home, before breakfast and getting into work from about 8-8.30am. I work till around 6pm, when my partner and I head out for a meal (why cook, when dinner for two costs about US$4 at a local market?).
Speaking of which, it’s her birthday, so we’re off for a slightly more expensive meal with her cousin and her partner somewhere in town.
Keep safe everyone. And many, many thank to my Patrons: your support enabled me to make this shift, from somewhere where I was worried every day about getting the virus, to somewhere where my emotional and intellectual energies can be focused on skewering the bad economics—and bad economists—that got us into this trap in the first place.
Figure 13: My office. It’s sparese, with no books, since there was no room in the luggage on our flight from Amsterdam (bar one on managing back pain, and another by Richard Tol which I intend using in my case against him and his fellow climate change trivializers) –but a nice backdrop of the local beach, which hopefully we’ll be allowed to visit again next month
Figure 14: The bikes in the house’s vestibule. My partner uses the motorbike far more often than I do, and I use one of the bicycles far more often than she does.
Figure 15: The car and house. The car is essential with no public transport to speak of, a 2km walk to the town, and a standard daytime temperature of 34°C. Paying a rent of US$300 a month for a 4-bedroom 2-storey house (which would cost maybe $120,000 to buy) makes Michael Hudson’s point that high houses benefit rentiers and make the West uncompetitive with the East, thanks to the wages that are needed to pay exorbitant rents and mortgages.
Figure 16: The 1km long internal main road of the community on which I do 5-15 laps by bicycle every morning
Figure 17: The entrance to the community, next to a 7-11, on a busy 4-lane highway into Trang
Figure 18: Temperature scanning takes place at every shop, and you have to use LINE to scan a QR code on entry and exit, to enable tracking in case a community transmission occurs
Figure 19: Personal protection equipment is plentiful and cheap. N95 masks for $1.25, 100cc alcohol sprays for $2
Figure 20: Everyone wears masks everywhere that they’re in contact with the public
