The Phuket provincial authority has curbed the opening hours of entertainment venues until midnight, from January 12 to 20, in order to control the Covid-19 situation in the province.
Issued on Monday, the order also prohibits diners from consuming alcoholic beverages in restaurants and at food stalls after midnight.
The Centre for Covid-19 Situation Administration on Tuesday confirmed three cases in Phuket after the second wave in December.
Det här var ju på tapeten för ett antal månader sedan men förpassades då till papperskorgen då alltför få golfklubbar anmälde intresse om jag minns rätt.
Thai minister proposes 'golf quarantine' to boost tourism
FILE PHOTO: Asia's Hideto Tanihara of Japan hits the ball on the fourth hole during the second day of foursomes competition against Europe at the Royal Trophy golf tournament in Chonburi province, near Bangkok, January 10, 2009. REUTERS/Sukree Sukplang (THAILAND)/File Photo
BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thailand's Tourism Minister said on Monday he had proposed a plan to allow foreigners to quarantine in some of the country's many golf resorts to boost the ailing tourism sector during the coronavirus pandemic.
"We are discussing with the Public Health Ministry and the country's coronavirus taskforce to offer hotel and golf quarantine for tourists with medical certificates," Minister Phiphat Ratchakitprakarn told reporters.
Foreign tourists would be able to spend the two-week quarantine period at a specified resort and move around in the hotel area and also play golf, he said, rather than just isolating in their rooms.
The plan, which is subject to the approval of the cabinet, comes as the Southeast Asian country grapples with a second wave of coronavirus infections after managing to largely contain community spread for months.
Thailand has reported a relatively low 10,834 COVID-19 infections and 67 deaths, though since several clusters emerged in December the country has been recording several hundred new cases a day.
Thailand attracted 40 million tourists in 2019 who spent 1.91 trillion baht ($63.4 billion), but the number of visitors dived during the pandemic after its borders were sealed, devastating hotels, restaurants and tourist spots that relied on foreigner visitors.
A special visa scheme that was started last year for long stay visitors has attracted about 1,000 visitors, Phiphat said.
($1 = 30.1300 baht)
(Reporting by Satawasin Staporncharnchai; Writing by Chayut Setboonsarng; Editing by Ed Davies)
Restrictions could be eased in Bangkok within the next two weeks
REUTERS FILE PHOTO for reference only
The restrictions put in place to help limit the spread of COVID-19 could be eased within the next two weeks, the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) said on Monday.
According to BMA spokesperson Pongsakon Kwanmuang consideration will be given to easing the restrictions if the number of new cases drops and if clusters in nearby provinces can be controlled.
Two clusters - one in Bangkok and one in Sri Racha - were still a cause for concern, Mr Pongsakon said, adding that infections linked to both are being closely monitored and those who have been in contact with infected people were being traced.
The possibility of easing restrictions in the capital comes as neighbouring Samut Prakan province on Monday announced it was ramping up its restrictions.
The province is now under the highest level of restrictions with people only able to travel outside of the province if they can prove their trip is essential.
Checkpoints will be set up in the province monitoring people travelling in and out,
governor Wanchai Khongkasem said.
On Tuesday, Thailand reported 287 new COVID-19 infections, with 278 being local transmissions.
Of the new cases, 176 were found in Samut Sakhon, 33 in Bangkok, 15 in Chonburi and 12 in Samut Prakan. Rayong and Ang Thong reported 9 and 8 cases, respectively.
Tourists arrive at Suvarnabhumi airport. Thai operators support the idea of forgoing quarantine for those vaccinated against Covid-19. Pornprom Satrabhaya
Offering an estimate of 80% of inbound travel companies closing, the Association of Thai Travel Agents (Atta) encourages the government to allow vaccinated visitors to visit the country without quarantine in the third quarter to boost demand.
Around 30% of 10,000 registered inbound tourism companies have shuttered permanently, while half have stopped their operations temporarily because Thailand cannot receive international visitors, said Vichit Prakobgosol, president of Atta.
Only 20% of inbound operators remain in business by pivoting to the domestic market, which is ravaged by the new spike in local transmissions.
"Operators have to fight until the last breath to maintain business, at least until the third quarter when there's hope for a new flow of tourists," Mr Vichit said. "If inbound tourism can restart, the country's economic recovery will get back on track."
As many countries have started mass vaccination programmes, operators in Thailand support the idea of exempting those from quarantine who are vaccinated against Covid-19.
He said the number of people who receive jabs in the first half this year may exceed 1 billion globally, including potential tourists from China and Southeast Asia.
The government has to start planning safe entry guidelines, such as requiring a swab test on arrival or a tracking application, said Mr Vichit.
Atta, the Thai Hotels Association and the Association of Domestic Travel joined a meeting with the Tourism and Sports Ministry on Monday to discuss urgent relief measures.
Phiphat Ratchakitprakarn, the tourism and sports minister, said he will submit the financial aid plan operators are requesting to the prime minister, making the proposal at today's cabinet meeting.
The ministry also plans to discuss the initial idea of hotel quarantine (formerly known as area quarantine), which allows tourists to stay within hotel areas outside their rooms.
If the concept is approved, the Public Health Ministry has to set the safety regulations within 1-2 weeks before proposing them to the Centre for Covid-19 Situation Administration.
"The special tourist visa aiming for long-stay tourists might fail to stimulate tourism," Mr Phiphat said. "But at least it helped assure locals that foreigners entering the country passed all the required safety regulations, which could ease quarantine rules."
He remains confident the hotel quarantine programme will bring more inbound demand to Thailand.
But the country will not rush into allowing inoculated tourists to enter without quarantine because it must wait for results from people who completed both doses of vaccine, leading to a discussion with the Public Health Ministry about further guidelines, said Mr Phiphat.
"The government is working on a measure to prove foreign tourists are vaccinated, such as certifications or passport stamps," he said.
The growing conflict between human and elephant in Thailand
Habitat Loss Is Driving Human-Elephant Conflicts in Thailand
Elephants feature prominently in religious and national iconography in predominantly Buddhist Thailand, whose national religion credits the jumbos with embodying the supreme qualities of the Buddha himself.
Yet their status as sacred creatures has not stopped some wild elephants from killing three Buddhist monks in three separate incidents in just a few weeks.
Not surprisingly, the killing of the monks by wild elephants has shocked many of the faithful.
"Elephants injure and kill people sometimes, I know, but I assumed they would leave monks unharmed because of their holy power," said Sudarat Saetang, a local Buddhist.
In one incident last week Phra Sombun Bunwat, a senior 64-year-old monk, was found dead with severe head, arm and other injuries in a grassy area at a rural village beside the Thong Pha Phum National Park in the central Thai province of Kanchanaburi.
A subsequent investigation revealed that the monk had been stomped to death by a wild elephant while he was on his morning alms round outside his monastery.
The pachyderm likely encountered the man and charged at him in anger or self-defense.
A few days later another monk, a 21-year-old novice, was likewise found dead with severe injuries, this time on a mountain in a rural area in the northern province of Kamphaeng Phet.
It is believed that the young monk was practicing meditation when he was attacked and killed by a wild bull elephant, which may have been in musth and so more aggressive.
A villager discovered the monk's body when he went looking for the Buddhist clergyman because he had failed to show up for his daily alms round in the community.
"He did not show up this morning, so I walked up the mountain," village headman Kraiwan Nontibut told a Thai-language newspaper. "I was shocked to find him dead."
Meanwhile, in late October a 52-year-old monk was trampled and gored to death by a wild elephant near his monastery in the seaside province of Chonburi in eastern Thailand.
He, too, was on his morning alms round when he was set upon by a pachyderm as the monk was walking through a grassy area peppered with clumps of vegetation.
A Cambodian woman who worked in the area as a farmhand said she had tried to warn the monk of the presence of foraging elephants by shouting out to him, but he did not seem to hear her or heed her warning.
Before the attack a herd of around 30 elephants had descended from the hills to the village in search of food in orchards and plantations, causing concerns among locals.
Although attacks by pachyderms on people are rare in Thailand, they do occur periodically.
Over the past century the number of elephants in the country has plummeted from around 100,000 to a few thousand, and even the remaining pachyderms have fallen on hard times in their natural habitats.
As once lush local forests have been cut down or become increasingly fragmented, wild elephants lack adequate roaming space and food.
hey frequently venture into populated areas to forage for food. As a result, elephant-human conflicts have been on the increase, according to experts.
"Conflicts have now been detected in 41 sites where wild elephants are present, up from just 20 back in 2003," Pichet Noonto, an elephant specialist, warned in 2018.
Between 2012 and 2018 as many as 45 people are known to have been killed by elephants while 30 others were injured.
Villagers living near the forests of wildlife sanctuaries and national parks inhabited by the country's last 3,500 or so wild elephants are especially at risk of being attacked by foraging pachyderms.
Conflicts between elephants and people have carried on ever since in some areas of Thailand.
In July last year, for instance, a farmer and his wife were attacked by one of three wild elephants that were foraging at a cassava plantation in the northeastern province of Buri Ram.
The man died of chest wounds while his wife escaped with minor injuries as she played dead before seeking refuge under a nearby truck.
Elephants, too, can be at the receiving end of violence. During the same six-year period between 2012 and 2018 at least two dozen wild elephants, which are critically endangered in Thailand, were killed by villagers seeking to keep the pachyderms away from their crops.
"Electrified fences are the single largest cause of elephant deaths, accounting for 72 percent of the fatalities," a Thai newspaper explained.
Traps and poison can also take their toll on foraging jumbos, while some perish in accidents as they try to cross roads from one patch of forest to another.
Encouragingly, more and more farmers are resorting to far safer methods of deterrence against jumbos, such as placing beehives around their plots.
Elephant skin is too thick for bees' stings, but the pachyderms have sensitive areas such as the tip of their trunk, mouth and eyes.
A swarm of bees can cause them real pain and the elephants know this.
"Elephants, revered and loved for ages in Thailand, have lately become a problem. Human settlements are expanding into elephant habitat, leaving wild populations of the species no other option but to invade human territory," explains the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Habitat Loss Is Driving Human-Elephant Conflicts in Thailand
Elephants feature prominently in religious and national iconography in predominantly Buddhist Thailand, whose national religion credits the jumbos with embodying the supreme qualities of the Buddha himself.
Yet their status as sacred creatures has not stopped some wild elephants from killing three Buddhist monks in three separate incidents in just a few weeks.
Not surprisingly, the killing of the monks by wild elephants has shocked many of the faithful.
"Elephants injure and kill people sometimes, I know, but I assumed they would leave monks unharmed because of their holy power," said Sudarat Saetang, a local Buddhist.
In one incident last week Phra Sombun Bunwat, a senior 64-year-old monk, was found dead with severe head, arm and other injuries in a grassy area at a rural village beside the Thong Pha Phum National Park in the central Thai province of Kanchanaburi.
A subsequent investigation revealed that the monk had been stomped to death by a wild elephant while he was on his morning alms round outside his monastery.
The pachyderm likely encountered the man and charged at him in anger or self-defense.
A few days later another monk, a 21-year-old novice, was likewise found dead with severe injuries, this time on a mountain in a rural area in the northern province of Kamphaeng Phet.
It is believed that the young monk was practicing meditation when he was attacked and killed by a wild bull elephant, which may have been in musth and so more aggressive.
A villager discovered the monk's body when he went looking for the Buddhist clergyman because he had failed to show up for his daily alms round in the community.
"He did not show up this morning, so I walked up the mountain," village headman Kraiwan Nontibut told a Thai-language newspaper. "I was shocked to find him dead."
Meanwhile, in late October a 52-year-old monk was trampled and gored to death by a wild elephant near his monastery in the seaside province of Chonburi in eastern Thailand.
He, too, was on his morning alms round when he was set upon by a pachyderm as the monk was walking through a grassy area peppered with clumps of vegetation.
A Cambodian woman who worked in the area as a farmhand said she had tried to warn the monk of the presence of foraging elephants by shouting out to him, but he did not seem to hear her or heed her warning.
Before the attack a herd of around 30 elephants had descended from the hills to the village in search of food in orchards and plantations, causing concerns among locals.
Although attacks by pachyderms on people are rare in Thailand, they do occur periodically.
Over the past century the number of elephants in the country has plummeted from around 100,000 to a few thousand, and even the remaining pachyderms have fallen on hard times in their natural habitats.
As once lush local forests have been cut down or become increasingly fragmented, wild elephants lack adequate roaming space and food.
hey frequently venture into populated areas to forage for food. As a result, elephant-human conflicts have been on the increase, according to experts.
"Conflicts have now been detected in 41 sites where wild elephants are present, up from just 20 back in 2003," Pichet Noonto, an elephant specialist, warned in 2018.
Between 2012 and 2018 as many as 45 people are known to have been killed by elephants while 30 others were injured.
Villagers living near the forests of wildlife sanctuaries and national parks inhabited by the country's last 3,500 or so wild elephants are especially at risk of being attacked by foraging pachyderms.
Conflicts between elephants and people have carried on ever since in some areas of Thailand.
In July last year, for instance, a farmer and his wife were attacked by one of three wild elephants that were foraging at a cassava plantation in the northeastern province of Buri Ram.
The man died of chest wounds while his wife escaped with minor injuries as she played dead before seeking refuge under a nearby truck.
Elephants, too, can be at the receiving end of violence. During the same six-year period between 2012 and 2018 at least two dozen wild elephants, which are critically endangered in Thailand, were killed by villagers seeking to keep the pachyderms away from their crops.
"Electrified fences are the single largest cause of elephant deaths, accounting for 72 percent of the fatalities," a Thai newspaper explained.
Traps and poison can also take their toll on foraging jumbos, while some perish in accidents as they try to cross roads from one patch of forest to another.
Encouragingly, more and more farmers are resorting to far safer methods of deterrence against jumbos, such as placing beehives around their plots.
Elephant skin is too thick for bees' stings, but the pachyderms have sensitive areas such as the tip of their trunk, mouth and eyes.
A swarm of bees can cause them real pain and the elephants know this.
"Elephants, revered and loved for ages in Thailand, have lately become a problem. Human settlements are expanding into elephant habitat, leaving wild populations of the species no other option but to invade human territory," explains the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
A nurse at Thammasat University's field hospital walks out of a ward where the first Covid-19 patient was admitted after the facility started operations on Monday. The field hospital has begun receiving Covid-19 patients from various hospitals in Pathum Thani. PATTARAPONG CHATPATTARASILL
The National Communicable Diseases Committee (NCDC) on Monday formed a sub-committee and tasked it with overseeing the rollout of the government's free Covid-19 vaccinations.
Dr Opas Kankawinpong, chief of the Department of Disease Control (DDC), said the sub-committee would be chaired by Dr Sophon Mekthon, an adviser to the public health minister and chairman of the Government Pharmaceutical Organisation.
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It will have responsibility for several key decisions, including managing the vaccinations, prioritising the order in which different groups receive their jabs and monitoring the progress of the programme.
The NCDC has also approved switching the method of conducting Covid tests from a throat swab to saliva examination -- this is cheaper to administer and has been shown to be more than 90% accurate, said Dr Opas.
The Department of Disease Control (DDC), meanwhile, on Monday gave its blessing to privately owned hospitals who want to provide Covid-19 vaccinations outside the government's "free for all Thais" programme.
"The situation with the pandemic is changing fast," Dr Opas said.
"We are going to see more pharmaceutical companies requesting Thai Food and Drug Administration approval and that means private hospitals will be able to provide Covid-19 vaccines."
Last month, the Public Health Ministry ordered a private hospital to remove an advertisement offering to sell Moderna's vaccine for 10,000 baht per patient.
The ministry said it could not allow the advertisement because the vaccine in question had yet to be approved by the FDA. Dr Opas said on Monday the DDC could still only approve private sales of the Moderna vaccine once it has been approved by the FDA.
He said pharmaceutical companies had already started rolling out their vaccines and the price would become more and more competitive as supply outpaces demand.
In Thailand, the only pending Covid-19 vaccination is the one offered for free by the state -- it is due to be launched next month and run until the end of this year.
Two competing vaccines have been confirmed for use in the state programme: about 60 million doses of the Oxford University/AstraZeneca formula and two million doses of the CoronaVac vaccine developed by Chinese company Sinovac.
The government has prioritised frontline medical staff, volunteers and high-risk groups to get the first two million jabs next month.
Thailand's Coronavirus Outbreak Shows No Sign of Decline with 249 Cases
Thailand on Monday recorded 249 new Covid-19 cases, raising its cumulative total to 10,547, including 6,090 cases since Dec. 15 when the second coronavirus wave hit the country.
Center for Covid-19 Situation Administration spokesman Dr. Taweesin Visanuyothin said the situation remained serious with more aggressive testing needed.
Since the onset of the second wave, Samut Sakhon – the original epicenter of the new outbreak – has seen the most confirmed cases with 3,341. Chonburi and Rayong – hit by the second cluster springing from an underground casino and, with 52 connected cases, a beer garden in Chonburi's Sriracha District, each have recorded more than 500 cases.
The beer garden, operating when bars were supposed to be closed, had three live bands playing at a superspreader event. Since then, 18 employees, 1 band member and 21 customers have tested positive, with 22 close contacts then infected.
Bangkok, Chanthaburi, Nonthaburi, Nakhon Pathom and Ang Thong have fewer than 500 each.
Of the 249 new cases Monday, Dr. Taweesin said 37 were in Samut Sakhon, with half of them women over 40, and a 9-month old baby girl, noting that more middle-aged women are getting infected.
Of the day's total, 224 were locally transmitted while 48 were found in active testing campaigns while the rest are arrivals from abroad in state quarantine.
Samut Prakan: Province that neighbors Bangkok up to highest level of Covid restrictions
Picture: Sanook
Samut Prakan province - to the south east of the Thai capital Bangkok - is now under similar restrictions placed on five high risk provinces last week.
Sanook reported there had been eight new cases of Covid-19 bringing the total in Samut Prakan to 269 with 246 still undergoing treatment.
A letter from governor Wanchai Khongkasem indicated that people will now only be able to travel in and out of the province if absolutely necessary to do so.
As with the other five provinces named - Samut Sakhon, Chonburi, Rayong, Chanthaburi and Trad - people will need documents showing permission to travel.
Police and health and protection agencies will be manning checkpoints on main roads.
Minor roads will see protection agencies plus local officials like kamnans and phu yai ban in charge.
The new level of restrictions mean that the entire eastern seaboard from outer Bangkok to the Cambodian border is now under travel restrictions and top tier measures.
