We got a bit of a scare a in the past few weeks as the government here was saying that they were planning to bring back the proof of vaccination for anyone coming into the country. This just happened to coincide with Chinese people heading this direction in large numbers.
I think I can speak for almost everyone who lives in Thailand both foreign and Thai when I say that we are completely fed up with any sort of regulations in relation to Covid. We don't even want to hear anyone say that word anymore. I don't know how much hell the rest of the world was subjected to in a first hand sort of way but here in Thailand we devolved into an authoritarian state pretty rapidly after initially resisting the global shutdown.
It started out with "wash your hands" and rapidly descended into needing to wear a mask all the time and stay 6 feet apart, and then the schools closed, then non-essential travel was suspended, then they closed most of the shops, then they locked us all into our neighborhoods with roving patrols making sure that nobody ever went outside.
What also was really bad was the fact that so many people lost their entire livelihoods during that period. Most of these casualties of Covid were people who were already not wealthy but had sunk everything they had into a tiny restaurant or shop of some sort. Their entire family's existence was based on the ability of that shop to remain open.
So many buildings are vacant in downtown Chiang Mai and that is what people mostly focus on, but out here in the suburbs where I live the devastation was exactly the same but I suppose it just isn't as noticeable because everything isn't jumbled together. My neighborhood, for example, had about a dozen tiny restaurants, a couple of places to get a haircut, some local minimarts that sold non perishables, and these pop-up markets at temples. Basically, if you didn't want to leave the neighborhood for weeks at at time you didn't have to. It was a nice option to have.
These days those shops are just now starting to come back. So when the government suggest the reimplementation of the rules that got us to this point in the first place I was happy to see that the population was very much NOT in favor of it even though there is some level of animosity towards the Chinese.
It wasn't the everyday person that got the government to listen but rather a collective of hotels and tourism businesses that have a "union" of sort that put pressure on the government to rethink this decision to put any regulations on an industry that was basically decimated by similar decisions in the past. It isn't a popular discussion but there are a lot of people, including most Thai people, that don't feel as though any of the regulations actually accomplished anything - it certainly didn't stop people from getting sick.
Virtually everything the government tried to implement in the name of public safety face-planted straight away and failed miserably. The attempts at locking people in their houses accomplished nothing, the face-mask strategy was abandoned after it was discovered it was having no effect on spread, and the "Thailand Pass" QR code launch was laughably bad in that it didn't work most of the time. The servers or whatever were not responding or were so slow and produced meaningless results to the point where even though it was technically required for everyone to use it, they stopped doing so, even at government buildings. If there ever was a place where government prescribed apps were going to be used it would be there; but even they stopped.
Thailand Pass, quarantines, mandatory insurance, PCR tests, and all the other nonsense went away and very little of those regulations still exist although there are some places where they still suggest you wear a mask. I do not do so.
I went off on a bit of a tangent there but basically when this proposed reintroduction of regulations went out to the public view the Thai people's response was a resounding "no." The government here is on very thin ice as many of the people believe that the regulations were sometimes put into place in order to stop dissent against the government. It may have worked for a while and the government was able to use the dropping of the regulations as an olive branch of sorts. But i think the Thai people remember the hell that everyone had to go through when one tiny little regulation simply lead to dozens more of them and now they are not going to let the government do any of them.
I'm happy that they scrapped this program before it even got off the ground. It's probably political so that the government can pretend as though they have the people's best interests at heart, but the real reason is that the current government is very afraid that another coup is right around the corner seeing as how it is a bit of a national sport in this country.