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BANGKOK: Thailand was racing to locate some 200 people in its northern provinces on Monday (Nov 30) to stop a possible COVID-19 outbreak, after three Thai nationals illegally entered the country from Myanmar and tested positive days later. .
Three women bypassed immigration controls and entered through natural border crossings last Tuesday and Friday, skipping the mandatory quarantine for new arrivals, said Chiang Rai Provincial Governor Prachon Pratsakul.
In Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai provinces there were 356 people potentially exposed, including staff members and customers of a hotel, shopping mall, cinema, restaurants and passengers in a van and taxi, Prachon told a news conference.
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Thailand has strict measures and border controls to keep the coronavirus at bay, having kept its cases to less than 4,000 and deaths to 60, although its economy dependent on tourism has suffered greatly.
Most of the infections in recent months have been imported and found in government quarantine, with only a handful of community transmission cases reported, in each of which massive contact tracing efforts were launched.
So far, more than 150 people in the northern provinces have been found and tested negative, senior health official Sopon Iamsirithaworn said at a separate press conference.
The first of the three new cases arrived in Chiang Rai on November 24 and traveled to Chiang Mai, where he later showed symptoms of COVID-19 and went to hospital.
Two others who worked at the same entertainment venue in Myanmar returned on Friday. They stayed at a local hotel and then looked for COVID-19 tests, which came back positive.
Myanmar currently records an average of 1,447 new COVID-19 cases each day, with nearly 88,000 infections and 1,887 deaths overall.
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