January 2020: The scanners used to stop Covid's deadly spread

In January 2020, Thai authorities were amongst the first to have to grapple with a worrying new disease. The frontlines included the country's shopping malls.

In January 2020, a new strain of pneumonia that has been worrying Chinese scientists and doctors suddenly becomes a global problem.

On 13 January, Thailand reports the first case of this new respiratory illness outside China: a 61-year-old resident of the Chinese city of Wuhan who had arrived in Thailand five days before. Slowly, the number of cases reported in Thailand increases.

Within a week, other Asian nations such as Japan and South Korea report cases. Within three weeks, the number of cases rises to the point that the disease became a "public health emergency of international concern" according to the World Health Organization (WHO) on 30 January 2020.

It will become much, much worse.

The gradual spread of the disease starts to attract the attention of the world's media. In Bangkok, Mladen Antonov, a Bulgarian photographer who works for the agency Agence France Press (AFP), starts to cover the steadily increasing reaction to the disease.

"Thailand took very early measures," Antonov tells the BBC from his home in Hong Kong in late 2024. "Southeast Asia has a big trauma from previous pandemics, the Sars and all these. So they are very, very cautious about all this."

Antonov says the Thai authorities quickly install body heat monitors in places such as shopping malls. Businesses within the malls, he says, usually pay for the equipment to be installed. The monitors pick up any abnormally high body temperatures, and anyone found to have a fever is reported to the authorities.

"I think it's the 27th of January [when this happens], or something like that. This is just the beginning," says Antonov. "Our job, as journalists for the wire, we had to provide daily [images] of how the world reacts. So I was walking around, going to different places, searching for images to show masks. That was actually what first we start doing, showing pictures with people with masks," he says.

Antonov then walks into a shopping mall, and sees the body heat scanner in operation. "It's not easy to work in commercial properties like this, like in shopping malls, you need special permission," he says. "So it was not easy to take the photo. But of course, I didn't ask. I just went and I start shooting them." Antonov has to move behind the thermal camera, which is being operated by two guards, and take a picture of the screen without them noticing.

"It was a challenging time, as you can imagine, for a photographer, because we had to go to hospitals. We had to be outside when people were really afraid, you know, for any contact you had to go out and even go and push, to go closer," says Antonov.

Thailand is one country that does not adopt the strictest lockdown procedures in early 2020. The thermal cameras soon became a common sight, Antonov says, as people travelled to work or to shop. "They introduced such thermal cameras to every metro station and to bigger shops. They were also using these 'gun thermometers', pointing the guns to your head and measuring the temperature.

"We in the wire business, we cover wars, we cover tragedies, we cover hurricanes, we cover typhoons, we cover earthquakes, things like this," says Antonov. "So this was just another one challenge; yes, very different than anything else that we did previously, but still something were you have to find a way to do it and to be inventive, because it's very repetitive… masks, masks, masks, masks," he says.

Around six weeks after the image is taken, Antonov starts to grasp just how serious the situation is. "We were reporting every day from… 200 offices around the world, so we had from everywhere information, we start counting cases, deaths and things like this."

The invisible virus is a very different challenge to the normal threats war photographers face. "Is it deadly? What does it mean to catch it?" says Antonov, describing the uncertainty at the time. "Because when somebody is shooting next to you, yeah, you know, there are bullets that can hit you, but this is something that you don't see it. You don't know [immediately] when you catch it," he says.

"We were washing our hands. We were using this spray disinfectants. Every one of us had small bottles in their pockets… every day, when you go back, you had to disinfect your camera," says Antonov.

"There was, of course, a kind of a lockdown, but it was not so draconian [in Thailand compared to elsewhere]," Antonov says. "There are a lot of people from the countryside who work in the hospitality industry in Bangkok, for example. So when the rumour came of the lockdown, they [the government] gave them couple of days [to prepare to leave]. People took their leave, they left their jobs and they went back home to their villages."

As the fear of the pandemic rises and the normally bustling shops start to quieten, Antonov sees what he calls "the most haunting image" of the early pandemic. "Grocery stores remained open all the time, and in big shopping malls, there are big supermarkets, and in order to reach the supermarket that is on the seventh floor, you have to pass through the escalators. They were making pathways in the shopping mall where you can go and all the stands, all the displays were covered in clothes," he says.

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Most of the lights in the shopping mall have been turned off, making the mall feel like the setting for an apocalyptic movie. "It was like… you know when humanity is just on the brink of disappearance, you walk alone in total silence in an enormous shopping mall, take the elevators, and you're alone, and everything is grey, nearly dark. You know, it's unbelievable, so surreal… this happened within a week after this image [of the thermal scanner]… we couldn't imagine that really colourful and bustling shopping mall could really be dehumanised in a week. Just now I have goose bumps when I remember all these images walking with my wife, going to buy groceries from the shop."

Before he leaves Bangkok for Hong Kong, Antonov visits some of Bangkok's usually busy tourist spots to experience their rapid emptying. They are usually filled with visitors watching professional Thai dancers. "You pay them, and they dance to please the gods. They were dancing with masks, with shields," he says. 

"Even after I left Bangkok, I continued to do namaste," Antonov says, describing the traditional bowing gesture performed by Buddhists when greeting people. "Bangkok, they do namaste, they don't shake hands. It's a good way not to transmit any germs. But for many years after I stopped hugging. Before, we were hugging with people… I'm working for a French company. and, you know, in France, people love to kiss each other.

"When the pandemic left and when everything stopped, I was continuing to kind of feel awkward when I have to shake hands.

"Now, after five years, I could say, yeah, the dark memories fade somehow, and it stays more a curiosity."

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