#kerajaangagal125 – Set dates when those above 65 years and 60 years respectively can walk-in to any PPV centre and get Covid-19 vaccination without registration to encourage maximum vaccination of population
We are fighting an invisible but lethal war against the Covid-19 pandemic and so far there have been more than 4,300 in Malaysia as a result of this war.
This is in fact a world war – for it has claimed more than 3.8 million lives in the whole word in the last 18 months.
We have more Covid-19 deaths in Malaysia than in South Korea, Myanmar and Thailand, and most shocking of all, by next week, Malaysia will have more deaths than China where this pandemic started 18 months ago.
China has a population of over 1.4 billion people or some 44 times Malaysia’s population of 32 million, but China’s toll from the Covid-19 pandemic stands at 4,636 deaths as compared to Malaysia’s 4,348 deaths.
This is a measure of the failure of the war against Covid-19 pandemic in Malaysia in the last 18 months, and why we must reverse the tides of war against the Covid-19 pandemic, so that life can return to normality and we can work on national economic and social recovery from the ravages of the pandemic.
There are many things we must do to turn the tides of war against Covid-19 pandemic, and two of them are:
- Effective and efficient Find-Test-Trace-Isolate-Support (FTTIS) strategy to ensure that we are always ahead of the pandemic curve.
- Acceleration of the national vaccination rollout especially in view of deadly Covid-19 variants, to bring vaccine to the people especially in rural and remote areas instead of bringing people to the vaccine, by having more PPVs, mobile vaccination units and even house-to-house vaccination teams.
Recently, Malaysia reported a drop in Covid-19 cases, but as the Parliamentary Opposition Leader, Anwar Ibrahim, has rightly pointed out, the decrease in the reported daily Covid-19 cases in the past few days did not mean the situation was getting better as other publicly available data showed that there was still a high case positive rate and high fatality rates.
All it meant was that there was decreased daily testing in the same period of time.
On May 29, the reported daily cases stood at 9,020 but it had dropped to 4,949 on June 14. But on May 29, a total of 126,480 tests were conducted. In the 15 days prior to that, testing had increased by 166 percent.
Since then, both the daily reported cases and daily testing have dropped 45 and 44 per cent, respectively.
I am glad that the Health director-general Noor Hisham Abdullah has called on private laboratories to ramp up their testing for Covid-19 as they are operating at less than half of their maximum capacity.
This is a sad state of affairs 18 months after the Covid-19 pandemic and shows up the failure of the communications strategy in the war against Covid-19 pandemic.
There is urgent need to re-strategise the war especially with regard to adopting an effective and efficient Find-Test-Trace-Isolate-Support (FTTIS) strategy to ensure that we are always ahead of the pandemic curve if we want to win this war and end the mounting casualties, in terms of case-loads and deaths.
Today, we have been offered another instance of the right hand of the Muhyiddin government not knowing what the left hand is doing.
The Minister co-ordinating vaccines Khairy Jamaluddin said he had stopped using the term “herd immunity” and he had advised the Prime Minister to be careful to use the term as looking at the data and the science, Covid-19 may very well be endemic and “we may see Covid-19 in a less threatening form, but it will stay with us for quite some time”.
Either Khairy’s advice did not reach the Prime Minister, or the Prime Minister has rejected Khairy’s advice, for Muhyiddin has reiterated that Malaysia’s target to achieve herd immunity as projected by the National Recovery Plan can be completed as scheduled following the increase in the supply of Covid-19 vaccines by the country’s major suppliers.
The Prime Minister and Khairy should straighten out the issue whether the country is going for herd immunity for vaccinating 80 per cent of the population or not, and how and when this is going to be achieved as 80% of the adult population above 18 years is only 63.8% of the Malaysian population. When will those above 12 years of age begin to be vaccinated?
The national vaccination rollout is still too low.
For a start, the national immunisation campaign should set dates when those above 65 years and 60 years respectively can walk-in to any PPV centre and get Covid-19 vaccination without registration to encourage maximum vaccination of the population.