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A note from Thailand…
I live in a remote village in northern Thailand, and have been here since COVID ‘started’ in March 2020. We left the UK on March 6th. It was just as people there were beginning to take COVID-19 seriously, and flew into Bangkok.
I remember looking intently at my brother, as he saw us off. I was wondering whether it would be for the last time. Medical care in a Thai village cannot be compared to that of Cardiff, near which we were living.
As it happened, we stayed in Bangkok with my wife’s sister’s family for two weeks. After that, we caught the last flight up north before the airports were closed due to the pandemic.
Coronavirus
On arrival,, the head of the local police took me aside cautiously. He warned me that I could kill thousands of old people, if I had brought the disease with me. There was some fear of Europeans at the time, it is fair to say. Indeed, after a government minister branded Caucasians ‘dirty foreigners’, the village barber refused to cut my hair, saying that the government had told him to avoid foreigners.
Lockdown
I was on lockdown at home, and it lasted for 65 days.
Nobody knew anybody who had had Covid in 2020. In 2021, people were still very wary, but no longer especially of me. I received two inoculations in October 2021 and a booster in January 2022.
At one point, 57 people in our village had Covid, or so I was told. However, that figure seemed to come from nowhere. From zero to 57 in a day. They were locked down, but there were no deaths.
Nowadays, nobody seems to be taking Covid seriously any more.
Covid 19
Nevertheless, I was talking to a concerned Irish friend from a nearby village the other day. He told me that he had experienced a very ‘fuzzy head’ for a few weeks, but that it had passed. I had had the same, but still had it also. I had put it down to ageing… Never having been this age before, I thought everybody must get like that after about 65. Our symptoms were exactly the same: fuzzy, foggy thought processes; forgetfulness, and a general tightness of the chest. I didn’t associate it with Covid, because my temperature never rose above 37c and I didn’t lose my sense of taste.
My friend’s conditions lasted a fortnight, but mine a month. If I had Covid, then I assume that my wife did too. She is a bit younger than me, but she experienced dizzy spells. Looking back on that period, there were rumours that there was a strange outbreak of dizziness in the village.
I certainly witnessed two old ladies fall off their bikes while trying to park up outside the local shop. We now believe that many of us did catch COVID-19. I suppose that there are two possibilities:
1] that our antivirus injections had weakened the virus’ ability to attack us; or
2] that the virus was not as powerful as we had been led to believe.