Covid Positive EVA Pilot Fined $10,600 and Sacked

[PeterRS]

Talk about utter stupidity. Taiwan had gone 253 days without any local covid19 infection. That changed when a New Zealand pilot flying for EVA idiotically broke the rules by not maintaining the mandatory home quarantine for just three days after returning from a flight. After one flight he failed to quarantine and consorted with a woman and visited some shops. Probably infected earlier in the month, he was found to be coughing on a flight from the USA back to Taipei and was not wearing a mask. In Taipei he had infected at least one woman and two other pilots. 170 people who had been in contact with the woman are now in quarantine and being monitored. The two shops known to have been visited by the pilot and the woman have been disinfected and further tracing of possible customers is taking place.

If Thailand had such severe penalties, would any of those employing immigrants and illegal immigrants at the fish market have dared do so?

[Guest]

2 hours ago, PeterRS said:

If Thailand had such severe penalties, would any of those employing immigrants and illegal immigrants at the fish market have dared do so ?

In Thailand, we never quite know if it's a lack of legislation, or a lack of effective enforcement, with bribes paid to police to turn a blind eye.

If they sent the army around to check on employers employing migrant workers and jailed any business owner employing an illegal migrant, the demand for illegal migrant workers would soon go away.  

Of course, the unfortunate side effect would be seen in the gay bars.   Over half of my hook ups on the last trip to Thailand were from Cambodia, Laos or Myanmar.   Passports typically are full of stamps from regular border runs, but I doubt they are allowed to be employed. 

Also, with a headcount in the armed forces 4 times that of the UK, they have enough of them to watch every single metre of border continuously.   Why were border patrols not stepped up ?   

 

[williewillie]

While I understand the anger and annoyance of the previous posters, the fact remains that Taiwan and Thailand have done an amazing job

of controlling the spread of Covid.  We’d all like 100% but human nature prevents perfection.

I have felt far safer living in Thailand than I would in any first-world Western nation,  far far safer..

[PeterRS]

I agree 99% with williewillie. But it is perfectly clear the Thai government dropped the ball big time with all the foreign and illegal workers at the fish market. After the April lockdown and the gradual easing, did absolutely no one look at what happened in Singapore with migrant workers? I find this impossible to believe, given that numbers of infections are reported daily. After Singapore was thought to have effectively controlled the number of infections, in May an explosion of infections was discovered amongst migrant workers. Treated very much like fifth class citizens, these workers mostly from India and Bangladesh receive minimum wages, live in packed dormitories one on top of the other and are taken to and from work in packed buses. As the government had previously been warned, they were a huge cluster waiting to happen. Then happen it did. 157,000 testing positive out of a workforce of around 300,000.

It is not as though successive governments have been ignorant about the number of migrant workers at the Samui Sakhon fish market and the fishing industry in general. For decades each government has said it would do something to stop the illegal practices and clean up all the corruption. Each government has done precisely nothing. Once again endemic corruption rules the day. By turning a blind eye to the possibility of a major cluster, the government has seen its hopes of slowly opening up the country collapse. Yes, it did an extremely good job. But how good is good if all that good work is undone because it failed to do what Taiwan has done - impose massive fines on those who break the rules? In my view the excuse that TIT is more than pathetic when it puts lives and whole industries at risk.