Dear Phuket officials and the Ministry of Public Health, you can spin it any way you want, but not telling all the facts in the hope of deceiving people into believing what you want them to believe instead of what is actually true is plain old lying. The coming to light of the fact that a Chinese tourist in Phuket was confirmed as infected with the coronavirus as far back as early last month now explains why Phuket officials mid- last month began to refuse to confirm what happened to the 10 people who were last reported as only “suspected” of being infected with the virus. Now we can just guess.
Dr Kajohnsak claimed that he had inspected and checked the report, but still would not confirm whether the Chinese patient in Phuket had tested positive for the virus. One thing is for certain, if the patient had tested negative he would have said so.
This is the problem that these officials have yet to understand. Once you have been caught lying, people get to choose whether or not to believe anything else you might claim to be true. If you can’t believe one thing a person says, how can you believe anything they say?
If Phuket officials, the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) and the Ministry of Tourism & Sports also knew about this case, they are no better. But now these officials, in trying to “build confidence among tourists in coming to Thailand”, have to convince foreigners and their governments that it is safe to travel to Phuket.
How do they expect people to believe them when they cannot even tell us where that Chinese tourist was identified as being ill, how the tourist travelled to Phuket and the people in close contact during the flight, where the tourist stayed in Phuket, which restaurants the tourist and friends and/or family ate at, or where that tourist went during his or her holiday.
And if we don’t know any of that about that one tourist, what else don’t we know?