At Thammasat University Hospital, about 20 miles north of Bangkok, doctors are scrambling to treat COVID-19 patients streaming in. Nearby, extra beds have been crammed in to a student dormitory block, turning it into a field hospital that can accommodate an additional 470 patients.
“We don’t have enough beds, we don’t have enough ventilators,” Anucha Apisarnthanarak, the chief of the infectious diseases division at the hospital, tells TIME. “This is only my hospital, but of course there are a lot more hospitals experiencing the same problem.”
In Jan. 2020, Thailand became the first country outside of China to confirm a case of the disease that became known as COVID-19—but it successfully fought off the pandemic for most of the year, recording less than 5,000 cases in a population of 70 million by mid-December. Now the total has skyrocketed 18-fold to more than 90,000 cases as this onetime COVID success story battles a worrying new surge.
