OPINION

More tests needed

Mor Prom might give an overly rosy picture of our fight against Covid-19 because it doesn't relate infections found to the number of tests which yielded those cases.

Consider that "Cambodia's official daily Covid-19 case numbers tumbled 76% in one day after PM Hun Sen told officials to stop administering rapid tests to people who don't show symptoms" according to a Nikkei Asia report on Oct 1.

This astounding result was because "approximately 59% of all transmission is caused by presymptomatic individuals who hadn't yet developed symptoms and asymptomatic people who never developed symptoms" as reported in Health News on Jan 11. Hun Sen produced a "miracle" by testing only those showing symptoms.

Are we following Hun Sen's example? It's not clear; we're doing far too little testing for reliable infection data. Countries doing very few tests per confirmed case are unlikely to be testing widely enough to find all cases. We conduct just 4.5 tests/confirmed case, versus Malaysia's 7.3 and the UK's 23.2.

Of the tests we've given, a whopping 22.3% have turned out positive -- over double the 10% that the WHO considers to be a general benchmark of adequate testing.

So, is Mor Prom credible? Only as far as it goes -- user beware, for we need much, much more testing.

Re: "Vaccine U-Turn", (PostBag, Oct 16).

I found Mr Ban's criticism of the letter to be a reaction to Mr Atkinson's politics, rather than to his facts.

The writer claims that the data Mr Atkinson published -- which among other things showed American Covid infections were up 300% over a previously unvaccinated period of time -- is "misleading".

Well, why has the writer not also called Joe Biden misleading? The Biden administration said the same thing, as did CBS. So, why are claims like those misleading when Mr Atkinson publishes them, but not misleading when the Biden administration or CBS publishes them?

These vaccines have issues. Nobody knows the long-term mortality rate and we're still learning about the problems this new medical technology has, so we're not helping ourselves if our approval of information is only based on our political view of the person who delivers the message.

Re: "Abortion will stay", (PostBag, Oct 16).

It must be something in the cooler air ... I actually agreed wholeheartedly with Eric Bahrt's letter on abortion.

More of that, Eric, and less of the other, and you'll get a lot more likes, as well as help keep my blood pressure down.

Re: "Extravaganza to cost up to B600m", (Business, Oct 15).

Splashing out such a vast sum on a few hours of mass entertainment is hardly consistent with His Late Great Majesty Rama IX's Sufficiency Economy theory.

Re: "Addressing issues", (PostBag, Oct 16).

Lungstib says that the cost of obtaining a certificate of residence from his Immigration office is 500 baht.

In fact, there is officially no charge for such a certificate and, indeed, I got one free from my local office.

Immigration did say that they could not issue a certificate to anyone over the age of 70. But when I asked the official to show me the regulation, they decided that they could issue a certificate.