Quote Originally Posted by goji View Post
Too damn right, the road deaths are worse, but policy ignores them !
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Then, to cut the road traffic deaths requires much less damaging interventions, with almost no economic side effects.
to have a significant impact on the road toll in Thailand would require a complete overhaul in driver education and license testing, a complete overhaul of enforcement of road rules, and a complete overhaul of driver attitude to safety and road rule compliance

apart from the fact that these changes would take decades to have an impact, can you perhaps see some obvious reasons why policy ignores this issue, and indeed why the interventions would actually be significantly damaging, though perhaps not to the people you were thinking of?

and actually I would argue the economic side effects would be significant, but positive - the reduction in lost man-hours and work years would increase productivity and drive export growth, though I don't think it would do much rescue the tourism or entertainment and restaurant sectors


Quote Originally Posted by christianpfc View Post
I see it the opposite way. Without lockdown, a few people would be sick and a few people would die, and the rest go on with their lives as normal. It's the lockdown and other measures the governments take that affect the lives and livelihoods of everyone.
I am sure if you did a quick straw poll on people's attitude to what constitutes an acceptable "few people" in that sentence you would get a significantly different response in the UK and many European and South American countries compared to Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and a few other countries

the balancing act between "acceptable" deaths and economic hardship is a difficult one that I would not like to be making, but rather than just rejecting lockdown I think it would be more productive to look at ways to reduce or better cope with the economic impact and make some short and medium-term adjustments to goals rather than just focusing on re-achieving pre-Covid goals on things like tourism

but if you seriously look at why Thailand is in the situation it is now you may possibly see that in many ways the confounding factors in managing COVID have similar roots to those for managing the road toll!