Questions raised over rising cases amid MCO

Three weeks into Malaysia's reinstatement of tighter rules under a movement control order (MCO), the coronavirus running rampant has continued to push the number of cases on a steep upward trajectory.

Experts said the authorities have dropped the ball on enforcement, testing and contact tracing, leading to community transmissions continuing unabated.

They also questioned why workplaces have been responsible for nearly two-thirds of the 350 new clusters reported between Jan 6 and 22, when they are supposed to operate only under strict safe measures.

The 3,000-plus daily infections that triggered the MCO on Jan 13 pale in comparison with the figure that now stands at more than 5,000; the 21 deaths on Tuesday also marked a new record.

Curiously, at the same time that MCO 2.0 kicked in, the authorities stopped testing all close contacts of Covid-19 patients, taking instead just 20 samples if the number of people exposed was less than 50.

If more were exposed, 30 people, or 10 per cent of the total number of close contacts, whichever is lower, would be tested. This is despite an open letter from 46 experts to Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin last month calling for more testing, as the positive rate has hovered at more than 8 per cent this year, well above the World Health Organisation's 5 per cent benchmark for effective containment.

Calling lockdowns "just a tool to buy time", healthcare analyst Heikal Rosnan said Malaysia needs a clear long-term plan based on the resources it has on hand.

"The virus is already in the community, so our activities need to be community-led and data-driven," the director of BowerGroupAsia told The Straits Times.

"We have more red zones now than green zones. Perhaps it's time to reverse the MCO and have people prove they're negative before going into green zones, thereby allowing economic activity to continue safely," he said.

Hundreds of new clusters and tens of thousands of Covid-19 patients have emerged.

Economic sectors like manufacturing, construction, agriculture and various services have remained in operation, despite reports of breaches in standard operating procedures.

ST reported last month that it was only after the government threatened to shut down their businesses that various trade groups and chambers of commerce began cajoling their members to voluntarily undertake more stringent and costly measures to pre-empt a total lockdown.

Raising even more doubts about the robustness of Malaysia's contact tracing was the revelation last week by health director-general Noor Hisham Abdullah, that the surge in numbers to Saturday's record 5,728 new cases was due to late reporting of infections from as far back as last year.

The government's Covid-19 Epidemiological Analysis and Strategies Task Force chairman, Professor Awang Bulgiba Awang Mahmud, said that without access to reliable data, it is difficult to formulate a proper strategy.

"The right kind of data is needed to determine this and it needs to be analysed by experts with the right kind of skills to tease out these patterns," he told ST, bemoaning a lack of direction.

"For example, if large clusters occur among workers, is it the workplace or the living conditions or a combination that is at fault? Is there any transmission between workplaces, clusters and localities which are preceded by a lag period, suggesting that the spread has a common link?"