Well, I'm on holiday. In Thailand, I'm lying in a large, comfortable bed in a fancy resort in Pouquet,

and it's spectacular weather, and there's an infinity pool overlooking an idyllic beach with palm trees on it,

and the glistening blue Andaman sea stretching as far as the

eye can see before me i hope that made you feel some combination of jealousy and also a wistful

yearning to get back to travel.

I'm taking time out of my holiday for the provision of some wonderful podcasting material,

as you can tell.

I pre-recorded this episode, so all I need to do now is talk to you here

about the insights that I've gotten from

traveling to Thailand and how they pertain to COVID. This is a sort of a microcosm of what

is wrong with the bureaucratic, well, I suppose right and wrong with the bureaucratic approach

to the coronavirus at this late stage in the game.

It doesn't feel like a late stage in the game in Thailand.

They're currently experiencing their biggest surge ever,

which is nothing like the kinds of surges that we saw in the United States

or even in Australia over the southern summer

when Omicron was going crazy and everything was open as a proportion

of the population. I think they're getting about 25,000 new cases a day, but they've got 65 plus

million people. And New South Wales, the state that I live in in Australia, has 7 million people,

maybe 8, and was getting almost 100,000 cases a day.

So they're one-tenth the case load of New South Wales at its worst.

But nonetheless, they're taking it very seriously,

...