Muhyiddin should resign after yesterday’s quadruple whammy - Malaysia’s worst day in 20-month Covid-19 pandemic with most cases, most deaths, most ICU admissions and most active caseloads
The Prime Minister, Muhyiddin Yassin should resign after yesterday’s quadruple whammy - Malaysia’s worst day in 20-month Covid-19 pandemic with most cases, most deaths, most intensive care unit (ICU) admissions and most active caseloads.
Yesterday, Malaysia logged a record-high of 19,819 daily new Covid-19 cases, 257 daily new Covid-19 deaths, 1,069 ICU admissions and 210,000 Covid-19 active cases.
It took Malaysia 10 months to reach the first 19,627 Covid-19 cases on Oct. 27 and the first 251 Covid-19 deaths on Nov. 2, but yesterday Malaysia exceeded these grim numbers in one day.
Muhyiddin’s war against Covid-19 pandemic has failed dismally – whether the six-month emergency which saw Covid-19 cases increase by five times and Covid-19 deaths which increased by 16 times or the National Recovery Plan.
We are supposed to transition to Phase 3 in September and October with one of the three thresholds being less than 2,000 Covid-19 cases a day, but we are in the opposite direction by tenfold and about to break the 20,000-mark for daily new cases, with the Health director-general Noor Hisham Abdulla’s prediction of 24,000 daily cases in mid-September probably on the low and conservative side.
Malaysia’s fall to become one of the worst-performing nations in the Covid-19 pandemic is best chronicled by the Bloomberg Covid Resilience Ranking, which saw Malaysia plunging from 16th ranking in January to 51st ranking in June and 52nd ranking in July out of 53 economies measured in economy size of more than US$200 billion.
Globally, Covid-19 cases have passed the 200 million-mark with the United States as the world’s No. 1 worst-performing nation with over 36 million Covid-19 cases and over 631,000 deaths.
But since the inauguration of new President Biden in January this year, the Covid-19 pandemic situation in USA in the last seven months have improved considerably, to the extent at there were days when USA had fewer daily Covid-19 cases or Covid-19 deaths than Malaysia.
For a considerable time, Malaysia is having more daily cases and daily deaths per million population than the United States.
Yesterday, we ranked the world’s No. 10 both for daily new Covid-19 cases and daily new Covid-19 deaths.
Muhyiddin should not wait until September to prove that he commands the confidence of the majority of Members of Parliament as it is clear that he has lost the confidence of the majority of Members of Parliament.
Parliament should be convened immediately in August with one agenda only – to demonstrate Muhyiddin’s command of confidence of the majority of Members of Parliament.