Last Wednesday, residents of dark-red zone provinces made a dash to restaurants and shopping malls after lockdown restrictions were eased. For businesses like hair salons and massage shops, reopening has restored a vital lifeline after they were forced shut for nearly three months.
But not everyone had reason to cheer. Over the past few months, many small businesses have closed and thrown in the towel, unable to meet costs with a trickle of customers and meagre aid from the government.
While the current phase of reopening is a step in the right direction, there's still more to be done. The change in the country's strategy from Covid-zero to "learning to live with Covid-19" comes as the pace of vaccination picks up (nearly 1 million doses were administered in a single day recently) and the case count begins to trend down.
Although it's still too early to fully reopen and drop all restrictions (we must wait until the vaccination rate reaches a sufficiently low level as seen in some Western countries), Thailand can learn from others as it guides its own strategy moving forward.
It has become clear that the Delta variant is highly infectious and will likely become endemic.
Even Australia, which has had one of the world's strictest lockdowns, ditched the Covid-zero approach after being unable to stamp out Delta.
While learning to live with the virus is important, equally as important is the need to resume tourism in some format.
Thailand's unemployment rate has hovered around 2% for most of the year, compared to below 1% pre-Covid-19; but the real impact is worse as people have returned to their hometowns and entered the informal sector.
On July 1, international tourism resumed with fanfare with the Phuket sandbox experiment, which was meant to be a reopening model for the rest of the country. Currently, Pattaya and Chiang Mai are rushing to vaccinate 70% of their populations to follow Phuket in October.
However, the Phuket experience, which promised "quarantine-free" entry and a "restriction-free" experience, is anything but sustainable.
Despite tough entry requirements that require tourists to be fully vaccinated, submit to multiple pricey RT-PCR tests, and reside on the island for at least 14 days, the province is not Covid-free. As it moves to control fresh outbreaks on the island, Phuket has abruptly changed the rules and regulations, from closing malls to banning alcohol consumption at restaurants.
Meanwhile, some tourists have been forced to enter alternative state quarantine for two weeks if a passenger on their flight tests positive. For many of them, this flip-flop and uncertainty has left a sour taste and exposed the reality that travel to Thailand in the Covid-era is drastically different from before.
If Thailand is serious about living with Covid-19, it needs to overhaul its international tourism strategy to reflect that change. Data from Israel, the UK, and the US shows that even fully vaccinated people are at risk of getting infected, so making them quarantine for two weeks makes little sense now.
The original requirements were put in place to prevent the virus from entering Thailand and were mostly successful until Delta showed up.
Vaccinated tourists pose little risk to the local population, so why not get rid of quarantine or reduce it to a more manageable three days to test travellers and fully verify they are not infected?
Mexico is a good example of a country that has seen tourism numbers surge over the summer. In May, Mexico welcomed 2.6 million tourists, up from 890,000 in the same month last year (the country logged 3.5 million visitors in May 2019).
Compare that to Thailand where Tourism Minister Phiphat Ratchakitprakarn recently estimated the country would see a total of 500,000 tourists for the entire year, in stark contrast to the 35 million tourist visits of 2017.
So why are so many tourists going to Mexico instead of Thailand? Simple, it's really easy to enter. The country doesn't require travellers to quarantine or even test for Covid.
As the mid-October deadline for the full reopening of the country fast approaches, the Ministry of Public Health has confirmed the state quarantine system will stay in place. Unfortunately, this means that the inconvenience of travelling to Thailand are not going away, which will drive many tourists to destinations that openly welcome them.
While there is a need to protect the public health system, there's also a need to make travel accessible and not restrictive.
A centralised policy needs to be established with attractive entry options for the entire country rather than half-baked measures for "safe" tourism zones.
