A collective gasp rippled through a crowded room of reporters on Wednesday when a projector set up by the staff of Narongsak Osatanakorn revealed the first images of the 12 boys who had been rescued, along with their football coach, from the depths of a flooded cave over the previous three days.

The video clips captured moments of levity shared between the boys, still confined to their beds and wearing surgical masks in an isolation ward, and the doctors who are now treating them at Chiang Rai’s Prachanukroh hospital.

“Actually, we didn’t want to show [these clips], but many people didn’t believe [that the boys are healthy], so we decided to show it to the press today,” said Osatanakorn, the head of the joint command centre coordinating the rescue operation, who has led the search and rescue effort since the boys went missing on 23 June.

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The boys are expected to remain in the hospital, about 100km from the mouth of Tham Luang cave, for seven to 10 days, hospital director Dr Chaiwetch Thanapaisal said on Wednesday night. They will receive regular health assessments, and samples of their blood will be sent to Bangkok for testing before they are able to return to normal life.

After they are discharged, they will have to stay home for 30 days to receive physical rehabilitation treatment and undergo continued health monitoring.

Osatanakorn said that if the boys’ health improves, they may be able to talk to reporters.

“This depends solely on the physicians and their families,” he said.

All of the boys have been able to see their relatives, but only from the other side of a glass barrier to prevent the transmission of any infections the boys might be carrying after spending more than two weeks underground.

According to Dr Thongchai Lertwilairattanapong, a public health department inspector, two of the rescued boys had mild lung infections. All of the boys, he said, had high counts of white blood cells, hinting at a potential infection of some kind. They are now all being given antibiotics and a series of vaccines.

The first four boys to emerge from the cave are now eating solid food, while those who were rescued on Monday night are still restricted to food that is soft and bland. The doctor did not comment on the diets of the boys and coach rescued on Tuesday, but if they follow the same procedure as those who emerged from the cave earlier, they will be eating what doctors call “medical food” for at least a day.

Play Video 0:42 Thailand cave rescue boys being carried on stretchers - video

While there are no reliable records on what the boys weighed before they went missing, Lertwilairattanapong has estimated that they each lost, on average, 2kg while in the cave, where they did not eat for nine days.

Despite the significant weight loss, the boys are in better condition than rescuers had expected.

“By the seventh or eighth day, we were wondering how we would help the boys. We thought about the kids and how frail and weak they would be,” said R Adm Apakorn Youkongkaew, head of Naval Special Warfare Command. “But weren’t our kids amazing? The UK divers said when they reached the kids, they came running to see them.”

Lertwilairattanapong credited the boys’ relative strength and health to adult supervision: “We gave credit to Coach Ekk, who has taken care of kids well. They selected good-quality water, so even without food, they could survive for nine days.”







