GEORGE TOWN – A former deputy health minister has denounced the possible reimposition of the movement control order (MCO) as a blind instrument akin to the nuclear-button option – effective to curb a menace, but should be avoided as much as possible.
Dr Lee Boon Chye told The Vibes that the Health Ministry should instead work on mining the data collected via the contact-tracing app MySejahtera to contain Covid-19.
“Having a total lockdown is very costly, with a very severe economic and social impact. Instead of asking if a lockdown is needed, ask ‘What are the alternatives?’. That is a more important question.”
The ministry already has access to MySejahtera data, which it can refer to if there is a Covid-19 outbreak in a certain locality, and use to conduct screening and contact tracing within 48 hours, he said.
He added that the data is not being used effectively, with a mere 4% of 125,000 infections identified via MySejahtera.
If used effectively, there would be no need for manual contact tracing, where patients are asked to recall the places they had visited in a given period.
Dr Lee said mass testing and quick contact tracing can be done in areas under the targeted enhanced MCO, adding that targeted lockdowns will not eliminate infections, but significantly reduce community spread in virus hotspots.
“There should be no lockdown unless it (Covid-19) is spreading like wildfire.
“For example, when it was announced that the Ipoh subdistrict is under the conditional MCO, nobody knew where that was.
“They looked at maps and couldn’t determine the location. In fact, there were just a few kampung that recorded active cases, not the whole of Ipoh. One cannot lock down the whole place just because of a few kampung.
“A lockdown is the easy way out. It is an easy decision to resolve an issue, as a lockdown will obviously lower the number of cases, but at what cost?
“Unlike the first lockdown, we now have the data, we have information on how the virus spreads, we also have a better understanding of how to treat patients and how to deal with asymptomatic cases. So, why should there be another national lockdown?”
It makes no sense for the ministry not to mine and make full use of MySejahtera data, he said, as the app should be able to identify high-risk activities that cause transmission and business premises with high transmission rates.
Asked whether people’s homes should also be registered as locations in MySejahtera, he said this would be controversial as it involves the issue of privacy.
“MySejahtera is more useful for public spaces, not the home.”
The app has seen 10 million downloads on the Google Play store. With Malaysia’s population of 32.7 million, this means only one in three citizens has it installed.
Last month, the Health Ministry said the app had about 24.5 million users, with 30,000 downloads daily. – The Vibes, January 11, 2021
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