As my Patrons know, I moved to Thailand on March 19 last year to avoid the Covid catastrophe I could see unfolding in Europe—and in the UK and the Netherlands in particular. I didn’t think that I would avoid Covid this way, so much as delay when I would be exposed to it, hopefully until after there was a vaccine, or an antiviral treatment for it.
Initially, this move was successful well beyond my expectations: Thailand not only had a lower rate of growth of the virus, it was also one of the handful of countries that eliminated it from within their borders. In the meantime, numbers in Europe exploded—particularly in the UK and The Netherlands. With a population of 17 million, The Netherlands now has 1.47 million recorded cases; Thailand, until December 18 last year, had under 4500 cases for a population 4 times as large.
Then things started to come a-cropper here, firstly with an outbreak in a Burmese migrant worker enclave in late December which saw as many as 1750 cases recorded in one day—but with very little community transmission, because the Burmese lived and worked largely in isolation from the general Thai population.
That wave seemed to be in the process of being successfully suppressed right up until the beginning of this month—April—when the number of new cases per day dropped back to a mere 26 on April 1st.
Unfortunately, that seems to have been an April Fool’s Day joke: it was the beginning of a 3rd wave, which emanated from the high-class entertainment venues in the heart of Bangkok, and involved the UK variant as well, which is much more contagious. There’s a puzzle over how it got into the community—it may have been through a quarantine breach, a cross-border incursion, an exempted entry into the country by someone of high status—but it’s rampant now. From that low of 26 new cases on April Fool’s Day, yesterday—April 23rd 2021—there were 2,839 new cases.
In a bizarre coincidence, worthy of the Improbability Drive in Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, this is precisely as many cases as Thailand reported in total precisely one year earlier, on April 23rd, 2020—see Figure 1 (this has data up till April 22, tough it seems to lag one day behind the latest data, since the official total for April 22nd was over 2000 cases, versus the 1500 cases in OWID’s file).
Figure 1: The Our World in Data Covid Database in Ravel
It is also over 100 times the number of new cases reported just 22 days earlier. That is just shy of seven doublings in 22 days, or doubling the number of cases every 3 days.
3,000 cases a day in a population of 66 million is still well below the level The Netherlands is running even today—roughly 8,000 cases in a population of 17 million. But at the current rate of growth, in less than a week’s time there could be as many cases per day here as in The Netherlands, and in under 2 weeks, the new cases per million could be as bad.
Figure 2: New cases per million on selected dates. The latest data would take Thailand’s level to over 30 per million per day
This experience reminds me of one of my favourite contrarian sayings: “Success is the first rung on the ladder of failure”. Because the Thais were so successful in suppressing the virus during its first wave, it appears that they became complacent during the next two—and especially this current one. The measures imposed to date have been far looser than back in March/April, when daily numbers peaked at 1/10th of the current outbreak—see Figure 3.
Figure 3: New cases on the same dates.
On the other hand, Australia’s several large outbreaks, due to failures in its quarantine system, seem to have kept the country vigilant, and responding to any outbreak, no matter how small, with very tight, focused lockdowns. Western Australia is back in another lockdown now, in response to just two cases in that State. To quote from that article:
“When you have two people out there … it just made it inevitable we had to take harsher actions and that’s all difficult and very hard,” [West Australian State Premier] Mr McGowan said.
The virus was in the community and unlike the January lockdown it was now evident the Victorian man had been able to spread COVID-19 to at least one other person, putting Perth and Peel into a nervous wait wondering whether either may be considered a ‘superspreader’.
As Yaneer Bar-Yam has emphasized, McGowan’s reaction is the correct one to this virus. Because it is so contagious, you take pre-emptive action (this attitude of State governments is why Australia has been so successful at suppressing the virus—not because of the actions of its Federal Government, which is a collection of buffoons lead by a buffoon-in-chief). Australia seems to be an example of failure being the first rung on the ladder of success.
The Thais, on the other hand, were very complacent about this last outbreak. Restaurants were firstly restricted from serving alcohol, then given restricted hours, then finally shut and restricted to takeaway—but only as the numbers escalated far faster than during the March-May lockdown, when numbers were far lower and the virus was the far less contagious original strain. But the authorities remained confident that the looser measures they were imposing this time would get on top of the outbreak.
Yesterday’s figures may smash that complacency. As I write this (12pm Thailand time), the official announcement of 2,839 new cases has yet to be made. I’m hoping that when it does, it galvanizes the Thai leadership into the same state of vigilance they had last April. If the outbreak gets much larger, then Thailand risks overwhelming its capacity to track and trace. Its medical facilities are far superior to and more accessible than those in India, but if the numbers keep rising at this rate, then it could soon find itself dealing with as many cases per million as is India—see Figure 4.
Figure 4: New cases per million on the same dates
Though Thailand is far richer per capita and far better resourced medically than India, this would not be a good look.
For my own part, I ceased going to the gym back in December after the Burmese worker enclave outbreak—and my waistline is paying the price. I replaced this with a 5km walk in a beautiful local park, but when the numbers exploded last week, my wife put the kybosh on even that. So those two regular out-of-the-house excursions are gone. Keyboard and in-room calisthenics are the limits of my exercise now.
So I’m doing my best to mimimize my own exposure, but even so, there have been cases in our own street—whereas back in 2020, there were a total of just 7 cases in the whole province of Trang (population 900,000), where we were then living.
The very recent explosion of cases in India, plus the proliferation of variants of the original virus, shows that we’re not out of the woods yet, even with the development and, at present, uneven deployment of multiple vaccines. It seems highly likely that we’ll crack 1 million reported new cases a day very soon, given current trends—see Figure 5.
Figure 5: New cases per day at the global level
It looks as though the much-maligned year of 2020 was just a warmup.
By the way, the figures here come from the Our World In Data database, but are displayed in the program Ravel that Russell Standish and I have been developing. One file is attached to this post, and if you’d like to check it out yourself, please download the latest version of Ravel from here:
https://www.hpcoders.com.au/minsky-distribution/Bv33YHY4YpQ4ZH/RavelBeta-2.21.0-beta.48-win-dist.msi
Alternately, we have an experimental Covid-only database under development at https://raveldashboard.azurewebsites.net/. This only handles Covid data (whereas the Ravel download above—PC only, sorry—is a generic program that can handle and data in CSV format), but you can run it without having to download or install anything on your computer—see Figure 6
Figure 6: The Ravel Covid database–still under development!—at https://raveldashboard.azurewebsites.net/
Ravel will be a commercial program, not Open Source, but for now we’re happy to give the beta away to get feedback from other users.