Greetings! Been awhile. A notice had me check in here, which isn't mostly about process issues, but I'll start with a short update about that.
We've been working on a GDPR derivative compliance process a lot, for the related Thai law (PDPA). A sister company implemented ISO 27701 last year, a Personal Information Management System, which we supported. We're doing a bit with anti-corruption formal process just now. We have 20k and 27k already certified, for a data center company.
On the main personal front, I was going to update how covid goes where I am now, in Thailand. Vaccinations just aren't mainstream at all yet, but then disease impact also isn't. Thailand did a hard lockdown in March through May in 2020 and the disease just wasn't here until it returned in December. We traveled a lot within Thailand last year. The renewed outbreak, limited mostly to an immigrant community in a province not far from Bangkok, led to partial shut-down in January to February, and status isn't clear now but close to it. 90-some people have died from corona virus in Thailand, officially, and the real number is probably low.
I talk to people in other countries in Asia regularly, especially in India, Vietnam, Laos, and China, and their experiences all vary. It was only ever widespread in India, and something really strange happened there related to a drop-off in case counts. Maybe a change in testing process just changed the official counts, or maybe something atypical happened related to real exposure. Since they don't keep much in the way of cause of death stats in India that impact never was known, and never will be.
Vietnam barely had virus impact, as we also didn't here. For the same reason; they shut down the country completely, both initially and when re-exposure happened. I really don't know how vaccination is going to go in both places. It's problematic, not necessarily mostly for getting the vaccines here, but related to an overall cost. Poverty isn't an issue here to the same degree it is in India, where the poorest half are getting by on very little, but relative wealth is lower than in the US. The government supports health care for the poor but it's complicated how that works out, too long to really go into.
The main impact has been foreign tourism shutting down. At a guess Thailand parted with about 15% of it's economic base related to that, and other forms of international contact and indirect impact might have eliminated another 5%. That's a guess; it could've been higher. Thailand re-opened with a mandatory two week quarantine at the end of last year but that's too much to ask of tourists.
In a sense that impact feels lower because it's limited to only some segments of the economy, not a general hit, and it didn't roll through to broader impact as much as it seemed it would. I really expected this to trigger a real estate bubble crash that I had been expecting, but that didn't happen. What do I know about such things, I guess.
We've been working on a GDPR derivative compliance process a lot, for the related Thai law (PDPA). A sister company implemented ISO 27701 last year, a Personal Information Management System, which we supported. We're doing a bit with anti-corruption formal process just now. We have 20k and 27k already certified, for a data center company.
On the main personal front, I was going to update how covid goes where I am now, in Thailand. Vaccinations just aren't mainstream at all yet, but then disease impact also isn't. Thailand did a hard lockdown in March through May in 2020 and the disease just wasn't here until it returned in December. We traveled a lot within Thailand last year. The renewed outbreak, limited mostly to an immigrant community in a province not far from Bangkok, led to partial shut-down in January to February, and status isn't clear now but close to it. 90-some people have died from corona virus in Thailand, officially, and the real number is probably low.
I talk to people in other countries in Asia regularly, especially in India, Vietnam, Laos, and China, and their experiences all vary. It was only ever widespread in India, and something really strange happened there related to a drop-off in case counts. Maybe a change in testing process just changed the official counts, or maybe something atypical happened related to real exposure. Since they don't keep much in the way of cause of death stats in India that impact never was known, and never will be.
Vietnam barely had virus impact, as we also didn't here. For the same reason; they shut down the country completely, both initially and when re-exposure happened. I really don't know how vaccination is going to go in both places. It's problematic, not necessarily mostly for getting the vaccines here, but related to an overall cost. Poverty isn't an issue here to the same degree it is in India, where the poorest half are getting by on very little, but relative wealth is lower than in the US. The government supports health care for the poor but it's complicated how that works out, too long to really go into.
The main impact has been foreign tourism shutting down. At a guess Thailand parted with about 15% of it's economic base related to that, and other forms of international contact and indirect impact might have eliminated another 5%. That's a guess; it could've been higher. Thailand re-opened with a mandatory two week quarantine at the end of last year but that's too much to ask of tourists.
In a sense that impact feels lower because it's limited to only some segments of the economy, not a general hit, and it didn't roll through to broader impact as much as it seemed it would. I really expected this to trigger a real estate bubble crash that I had been expecting, but that didn't happen. What do I know about such things, I guess.
