BANGKOK– Deputy Prime Minister and Public Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul asked the Chinese envoy to convince the Chinese government to sell its medicine for Thailand to treat patients of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
Mr Anutin said that in his meeting with Chinese charge d’affaires Yang Xin, he sought the favour from the Chinese government which did not have a plan to export the medicine.
“Most medicine that Thailand is buying will be used to treat patients in the country and most of them are Chinese people,” he said.
He admitted that the Government Pharmaceutical Organization bought an amount of medicine from China last week for local COVID-19 patients and the purchase resulted from the organization’s special connection with another drug manufacturer.
Mr Anutin denied the rumor that Thailand did not have medicine to treat COVID-19 patients.
“The drugs that Thailand makes can treat patients’ symptoms. Thailand has enough drugs to treat patients until their recovery on the condition that the outbreak does not get worse,” he said.
Thailand had more confidence in treating COVID-19 patients because 28 of 43 patients recovered and returned home, Mr Anutin said. Fourteen patients remained at hospitals and one of them died.
“The cause of the death has yet to be determined… He recovered from COVID-19 but also had other illnesses which made him unable to survive,” he said.
Existing medicine could treat patients’ symptoms to allow them to build their own immunity and recover from COVID-19, Mr Anutin said.
He also said that Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha would today announce a plan to cope with COVID-19 and that the disease’s outbreak remained at its second stage, not the third stage of wide spread among many people.
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