One of the first things that the Thai government attacks anytime anything goes wrong is clubs, discos, and other alcohol-related venues. This has been especially true during Covid and at first when everyone thought that they could control Covid by keeping people away from one another and keeping their mouths covered, this made sense.
As time has passed it has started to make less and less sense since certain venues such as absolutely packed and huge food courts and restaurants have been allowed to be open at capacity, but pubs with 1/10 the capacity were forced to remain closed. It seemed to be based on nothing other than whether or not your establishment served food and not about proximity or anything Covid-related.
I personally know the owners of several pubs that changed their company registration and started having a menu in order to be classified as a "restaurant" instead of a pub. One of those places didn't even serve the food on the menu, they didn't even have a kitchen, but the registration and red tape associated with it was all that mattered and after changing his company registration, he was allowed to be open.
Even with the places that were allowed to be open and sell alcohol, some of which were doing it in a semi-legal way like my friend's place, they still had to close at 9pm as if Covid somehow spreads faster at night like some sort of vampire virus.
There were exceptions of course, certain parts of the country that depend on nightlife for tourism were allowed to break these supposed nationwide rules and their entertainment venues were open. This was true sporadically and seemed to be governed from place to place rather than any sort of official ruling stating that it was allowed.
Chiang Mai is notorious for being one of the only places in Thailand that does things by the book or at least as close to the book as you are going to get in a country as corrupt as this one. Therefore, we have seen most places be forced shut that were alcohol specific and this was done under the auspices of protecting us poor idiots from Covid... yet gigantic shopping malls, movie theaters, and public squares were absolutely packed with people.
So I'm having a difficult time understanding how this protects anyone against anything and it just seems to be an attack on alcohol. About a year ago, the government announced a few days prior that they were going to ban the sale of alcohol nationwide for a certain amount of time in order to combat Covid. This didn't just mean closing bars and restaurants, but now you couldn't even have it in your own home.
Of course an immediate rush to buy all the alcohol in existence immediately ensued.
I don't even drink at home very often but I will admit that I was one of the people queueing up to buy a few cases at my local shop also.
That is all in the past though as this country is experiencing a strong push to return to "normal."
The government announced that venues can remain open until 11 pm now instead of 9. Let me explain how stupid this is. Even before anyone knew what Coronavirus was the cutoff point for alcohol sales was midnight so why not just return it to what it was before? It's almost like they are just flexing their muscles to remind the population that they can make them do whatever they want. What on earth is this one hour difference going to possibly accomplish?
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This is fine because people are buying stuff in retail... but you can't go to your corner bar because it is too dangerous to be close to people
Furthermore, the amount of people allowed at any venue has been raised to 1,000 which is a number that just makes me shake my head as I am writing this. There can't possibly be any reasoning behind this very arbitrary number and again, it is just some politician pulling numbers out of the sky. Also, you technically CAN have venues with more than 1000 people attending but you first have to ask permission from the Health Department before doing so. I can tell you already what this really means: You have to give some "tea money" or probably quite a lot of it if you are planning an event with more than 1,000 people.
As silly as these changes are, at least they are doing something and I should just count my blessings. Thailand is slowly but surely getting rid of all things covid related and seeing as how the control measures they previously had in place, including the really hardcore ones where people were not allowed out of their neighborhoods, had almost zero effect on the spread of Covid. It's time to give up guys, just let everything be open. Nothing that you have done up to now has worked and I think it is time to stop pretending as though it did or will have any impact moving forward.