When should Thailand end all restrictions and testing?

[djay]

In the middle of omicron wave in thailand a lot of people are pointing to other countries that are relaxing all or almost all restrictions and dismantling some of their test systems and saying Thailand should do the same.

[djay]

What CCSA says

4.3 To reach endemic stage, the fatality rate for COVID-19 must not exceed 0.1 percent and more than 60 percent of population must have received their booster dose.
CCSA Briefing 2022-04-28

According to the National Communicable Disease Committee, endemic status can be given to provinces with less than 10,000 new cases per day, and where the fatality rate does not exceed 0.1%. Another stipulation is that more than 80% of those at-risk have received coronavirus vaccine doses. Dr Suthep said if no new coronavirus variant emerges, he is confident Covid-19 will be declared an endemic disease by July 1.

• Bangkok Post: 2022-04-25: No endemic status before EOC's nod

Expert opinions

The best answer I've seen comes from Katelyn Jetelina in Riding the waves: A framework for the future of SARS-CoV-2 - feb 7 2022 which is summarised below.
Note: Thailand however does have extensive private ATK testing compared to USA in feb which does change the meaning of the positive rate so you would expect a higher positive rate since you'd expect more people to know they are positive before getting the PCR test. Due to this its hard to know what the equivalent of > 10% positive rate would be.

When did other countries do it?

Checking on Reuters Tracker it can see when restrictions are dropped vs case and death trends.

For example Philippines

or Sweden

it seems that almost all countries drop border and other restrictions once omicron is clearly going down. This makes sense since it there was still some uncertainty on how high cases and hospital utilization might go and also because its perhaps bad optics to be dropping restrictions with rising cases.
Some countries like UK did get a caught out by the BA.2 2nd spike

My Personal Opinion

I think border controls in Thailand stopped being useful at the start of the Delta outbreak, esp in regard to the cost to tourism. The only thing it perhaps did is buy more time when a new variant came about but other restrictions like mask wearing also did that to some extent. It would take some serious modelling however to work out how much impact a lot of tourists would have had on the spread so this is just a guess.

I think lockdowns did work for Thailand in buying time for vaccinations and this saved lives. Even factoring in excess deaths thailands death rate is fairly low. As of April 2022 this is still being played out however because the elderly vaccination rate is not very high so the final cumulative death rate will rise once omicron gets everywhere.

I think bar bans and early closers was likely effective just because enforcement of other methods of social distancing is difficult in Thailand. Even enforcement of that restriction is difficult.

I think the mask mandate slowed the spread and perhaps still is. Previously this bought time for vaccinations. As of April 2022 this may have caused to the omicron wave to go on for longer than other countries but this is just an idea. You could argue a quicker wave would have been better so border controls could be relaxed earlier and the toursim sector could recover sooner. This assumes that elderly who weren't vaccinated by this point are unlikely to given vaccines seem to be widely available everywhere. The government did do a campaign to increase elderly vaccinations from April but it seems too little too late. There are too many unknowns here to make a judgement.

I think testing of some kind is useful. We don't yet know if omicron is the final variant. Whatever is take away now might have to be brought back quickly if there is a variant that is more deadly.