KUALA LUMPUR – Pakatan Harapan today introduced the PascaCovid-19 Dashboard so the people can look through multiple sources of publicly available data on Covid-19.
Coalition chief Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim said existing data from the Health Ministry and MySejahtera app is incomplete and has failed to provide an overview of the plan to curb the pandemic.
“The fundamental issue is lack of transparency. To manage this pandemic there needs to be data. What is the rationale for hiding the figures?
“We don’t want to know their names (Covid-19 victims), we just want to know the numbers so we can know what can be done next,” he said during an online press conference via Zoom.
The website, developed by Yayasan Harapan under the post-Covid-19 strategy, is an initiative to invite all stakeholders to work together and make use of existing data and expertise to pull the country out of the pandemic.
Present during the press conference was Yayasan Harapan founder Wan Muhamad Hasni Wan Sulaiman – a leading data scientist in Malaysia.
Wan Hasni said real-time data makes it easier for relevant parties to make projections and will help the government make the best decision for the people.
“The current data projection is 7,000 cases. Supposedly, we could have expected this over the past three weeks, yet it didn’t happen.
“Our job is to not criticise, but to complement. In fact, most of the data provided is not in the form of actual data but an infographic.”
PascaCovid-19 Dashboard, which has analyses, trends and interactive maps related to the pandemic, can be browsed here for free.
Meanwhile, Anwar said vaccination is a priority, but its roll-out is implemented at a very slow rate compared with countries such as Indonesia and Turkey.
The government via the National Pharmaceutical Regulatory Agency should approve the provision of other types of Covid-19 vaccine immediately, and use election campaign methods to speed up the vaccination process in rural areas, he added.
“Don’t give (the public) clumsy reasons. If during a political campaign we can get into the interior, why not use the same method for the Covid-19 vaccination process?
“They need help. The government should not sleep. Do something because… there is already a trust deficit among the people to the government.”
He gave the impression that if he was prime minister, he may implement allowance or salary cuts because the Covid-19 issue is a disaster that needs to be addressed together.
“If we have disasters and epidemics like this, I will take extraordinary measures such as cutting allowances or salaries because this involves human lives.” – The Vibes, May 26, 2021
