Hope that 2021 Deepavali will mark the beginning of Malaysia’s victory over one of the world’s longest Covid-19 wave in Malaysia

The Finance Minister, Tengku Zafrul Tengku Azz presented the 2021 Budget in Parliament on Nov. 6, 2020 entitled “Resilient as One, Together we Triumph” with the largest budget of RM322 billion to help the country cope with the economic impact of Covid-19 pandemic, but it was of no help when the country plunged into hellish conditions when an emergency was declared on January 11, 2021.

This is clear from the fact that when the emergency was declared on 11th January 2021, the cumulative totals of 138,224 Covid-19 cases and 555 deaths shot exponentially to 2,460,809 Covid-19 cases and 28,832 deaths yesterday when Tengku Zafrul presented his 2022 budget in Parliament.

The 2022 Budget is bigger than the 2021 Budget – as it is now RM332.1 billion which is RM10.1 billion more than the previous budget. But will it be as catastrophic as the 2021 budget which saw Malaysia lost control of the Covid-19 pandemic, and became one of the worst performing nations in the world in the Covid-19 pandemic, worse than all the ASEAN nations and even worst than Indonesia, India and China, the three countries whose great civilisations meet in confluence in Malaysia.

This was why the Confidence-Supply-Reform (CSR) Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed between Prime Minister Ismail Sabri and the Pakatan Harapan leaders, Anwar Ibrahim, Lim Guan Eng, Mohamad Sabu and Wilfred Madius Tangau on Sept. 13, 2021, for we want the dizzying increase of daily new Covid-19 cases and daily Covid-19 deaths to be replaced with much slower figures.

This has been achieved but I like to see greater speed in the reduction of the daily new Covid-19 cases to double-digit figures, the reduction of daily Covid-19 deaths to single-digit figures and the Brought-in-Dead (BID) Covid-19 deaths become a rare phenomenon,

I would think that the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic is over and I hope that 2022 Deepavali will mark the beginning of light over darkness in the Covid-19 pandemic, with Malaysia winning the war against one of the world’s longest Covid-19 waves in Malaysia.