Like many Malaysians, I breathe a sigh of relief after seeing Khairy Jamaluddin replacing Adham Baba as Minister of Health. From his track record in handling national vaccination program, I believe he is a good pick for the position from the current pool of “talents” in Kerajaan Gagal 2.0.
There are many things on his plate to right the wrong strategies taken by his predecessor in managing Covid-19. I would like to point to one here, which is the government approach to find, test, trace, isolate and support (FTTIS).
Since last year, many health experts and members of parliament have been calling for more testing to be done according to the World Health Organization (WHO) recommendation of a positive rate of 5% or lower. In fact, countries which are successful in controlling the spread of the virus such as China went way below 1% in their positive rate.
Recently, the Ministry of Health has finally released more granular testing numbers by states. The first image shows the average positive rates (11-26 Aug 2021) in different states. It clearly shows that except with Labuan, all other states/territories positive rates are above 5% with more than 10 above 10%, out of which 4 – Kedah, Kelantan, Sabah, and Selangor, are above 15%.
In short, we are severely under-testing our population and our daily positive cases number, although high, is under-reported.
Not only that, our contact tracing mechanism is almost fully manual while other countries, which are successful in controlling the spread of virus, are using much better and sophisticated data analytics to allow for more comprehensive tracing to be done on close contacts. MyTrace, which is a tracing application launched by our current Minister of Health when he was Minister of Science, has not been making any significant impact in tracing, nor is MySejahtera.
Image 2 shows that sporadic cases (cases that are unlinked and cannot be traced as clusters) increases from about 50-60% of the total cases at the beginning of this year to 90% now. This shows clearly that the current testing and tracing system is totally incapable of tracing the pattern of spreading of the virus.
With severely insufficient testing and primitive method in tracing, it is impossible to isolate the positive cases effectively to prevent further spreading in the community.
As the government is planning to re-open the economy while managing the spread of Covid-19, it cannot rely solely on vaccination. A multi-pronged strategy is needed and an effective FTTIS is definitely one of the most important elements to be added.
We’ve been calling for actions to improve FTTIS for more than a year but it has fallen on deaf ears. I hope the newly appointed Minister of Health will be more open to suggestions and act on them.