Thailand was nailing coronavirus until they started to see a sudden spike

As the end of 2020 approached, Thailand was in an enviable position.

As other nations confronted soaring coronavirus case numbers, the country had only 4,246 infections and just 60 deaths in a population of 70 million people.

The case that caused the spike

Then, the week before Christmas, a 67-year-old vendor at a seafood market in Samut Sakhon province, just outside Bangkok, tested positive to COVID-19 despite no overseas travel records.

It remains a mystery precisely where and from whom the vendor contracted COVID-19, but Thailand’s Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha has pointed the finger at illegal immigrants from neighbouring Myanmar.

As questions remain over how exactly the outbreak started, new case numbers have ballooned to more than 7,000 across most of Thailand’s 77 provinces.

There have been another nine deaths, although half of those infected in the latest wave have now recovered and most people have not needed prolonged hospital treatment.

Even so, Thailand remains on edge.

Can Thailand get control of second wave?

Dr Richard Brown, program manager for health emergencies at the WHO in Thailand, told the ABC he was confident Thailand was managing the new outbreak effectively.

“Because Thailand has this experience that they have built up in successfully controlling the COVID pandemic to date, what they will be able to do is leverage this experience,” Dr Brown said.

He added that after Thailand had “re-established control” after its first wave of infections, it became one of the first countries in the world to carry out an assessment of how the health system responded to COVID-19.

“It involved looking critically at the different technical and policy areas,” Dr Brown said.

“Both to identify things that had gone well, so-called lessons learned, but also to look at areas where there was scope for improvement.”