Thailand okays guidelines to declare COVID-19 an endemic disease: 'It is no longer severe'

Thailand’s Public Health Ministry plans to declare COVID-19 an ‘endemic’ by the end of this year 2022, relative to its own data, analysis, and the criteria —whether or not the World Health Organization (WHO) approves, Bangkok Post reported on Friday. Officials held a meeting of the ministry's National Communicable Disease Committee and decided to end the pandemic at their own accord using their own academically acceptable criteria before the year ends. 

Health permanent secretary Kiattiphum Wongrajit made the announcement that Thailand plans to end the COVID-19 pandemic this year. Deputy government spokeswoman Traisuree Taisaranakul said the government was ready to amend regulations in order to return back to pre-pandemic normal lives and end the ‘new normal'. The COVID-19 will then be treated as a seasonal or contagious disease such as the common cold, Taisaranakul told Thai Enquirer.

The government will expand the vaccination centres and clinics to facilitate walk-in immunisations against the virus. Director of the Department of Medical Sciences (DMSC), Thailand, Dr. Supakit Sirilak said that the government decided to end the pandemic due to the substantial data on extremely low fatality and no major threat from the mutated strains lately. 

“The situation is controllable,” Thailand’s medical expert Dr. Supakit Sirilak said, adding that he hopes the Omicron would become the dominating variant, replacing Delta, by the end of this month.

COVID-19 disease 'no longer severe': Thailand 

Thailand has administered nearly 114 billion doses of the COVID-19 vaccine. It has jabbed nearly 70 percent of the total population with two doses while 20 percent received the third dose, Public Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul told the paper. These, he said, should be enough for the people to fight the milder form of the variants.

Medical and frontline workers in Thailand have,100 percent of them, have already received four doses of the vaccine. Permanent health secretary Kiattiphum Wongrajit agreed with the decision as he stressed that while the disease was still transmissible and could well spread, it is no longer severe and the fatality rate is “acceptable” to declare it an endemic. The WHO, meanwhile, has been rejecting the idea and warning countries that an "unpredictable level of transmission" was happening worldwide. "That is because the virus is continuing to evolve and Omicron is able to partially escape immunity."

Thailand has joined the scientists and medical experts worldwide including in European countries, and India that have predicted the COVID-19 pandemic moving towards its endemic phase. A senior epidemiologist at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi had similarly said that India was heading towards emerging out of the pandemic gradually. Dr. Sanjay Rai told ANI that owing to the high rate of vaccination, and the fact that the majority of Indians have already been infected or will be getting infected from Omicron, the "virus will convert into an endemic virus." Denmark has also announced that it will no longer consider COVID-19 as a "socially critical disease" as of February 1 based on the recommendation of the parliament's epidemiology committee. It has caused no increase in hospitalizations or fatalities, Health Minister Magnus Heunicke reportedly said in a letter.