Can Khairy explain why for 16 consecutive days, Indonesia has reduced its daily new Covid-19 cases to less than that of Malaysia - to even less than half like yesterday’s 8,955 cases to Malaysia’s 20,988 cases?

Can the new Health Minister, Khairy Jamaluddin, explain why for 16 consecutive days, Indonesia has reduced its daily new Covid-19 cases to less than that of Malaysia - to even less than half like yesterday’s 8,955 cases to Malaysia’s 20,988 cases?

This is not fault-finding but to find ways to improve our handling of the Covid-19 pandemic so as to win the war against it instead of being one of the worst- performing nations in the world in the Covid-19 pandemic in the past year.

According to Our World in Data website on Sept. 1, we are the worst performing country in ASEAN, whether in macro in micro numbers, whether in (i) total and daily cases per million population or (ii) total and daily deaths per million population. This is clear from the following tables:

(i)

(ii)

At the present pace of infection and death, we will break the 1.8 million-mark for cumulative total of Covid-19 cases today and we will break the two million-mark for cumulative total of Covid-19 cases and break the 20,000-mark for Covid-19 deaths when we celebrate our 58th Malaysia Day on September 16, 2021.

We will have overtaken another two countries, Iraq and Netherlands, to be ranked No. 21 among countries with the most cumulative total of Covid-19 cases, joining 20 other countries with over two million Covid-19 cases.

This is an infamy we must overcome as these are unimaginable numbers for Malaysia when the Covid-19 pandemic started 20 months ago.

For months, I have called on the government to distance itself from its blind faith in “total lockdowns” and to open up businesses in keeping with “Live with Covid” instead of “Zero Covid” objective and to use targeted lockdowns instead of total lockdowns.

I have also called for of an “all-of-government” and “whole-of-society” policy, strategy and approach to win the war against the Covid-19 pandemic.

I had glad that this “Live with Covid” policy is now the government policy, as the Prime Minister, Ismail Sabri has himself said yesterday that “everybody must be ready to live with Covid-19” – but it must be on our own terms.

We cannot allow a situation where Covid-19 cases are raging and there is a high fatality rate – as in Malaysia now, with 21,988 daily new cases yesterday and 249 Covid-19 deaths.

Furthermore, Malaysia does not want the infamy of having the longest Covid-19 wave in the world, as the present wave started from the Sabah state general election in September last year.

The greatest test for Khairy as the new Health Minister is whether he can return Malaysia firstly to before the emergency on Jan. 11, when we had 2,021 daily new Covid-19 cases and four Covid-19 deaths; and secondly, to the 57th Malaysia Day a year ago on Sept. 16, 2020 when we had 21 daily new cases and zero death.

Khairy evaded my question on the escalating daily new Covid-19 cases and record-high deaths in the midst of increasing vaccination rates by asking me to look at hospitalisation numbers from Covid-19.

Khairy had missed my point altogether.

I was not disputing the effectiveness of vaccination to reduce the risk of severe infection and complications, but warning of the fallacy of solely dependent on vaccination to win the war against Covid-19 pandemic, as illustrated by the experience of other countries.

The national vaccination rollout is too slow and should be ramped up but this alone will not win the war against the Covid-19 pandemic.