KUALA LUMPUR – The management of 1 Utama Shopping Centre has refuted a report by the Petaling District Disaster Management Committee (Petaling JPBD) that there are 63 Covid-19 cases originating from the mall.
“We would like to hereby state that the 44 Covid-19 positive cases of security guards mentioned in Petaling JPBD's report do not originate from 1 Utama and were not part of the 6,000 mass testing that we conducted.
“They are in fact outsourced contract guards from a third party service provider where Covid-19 was contracted through a dormitory and not within our premises,” the 1 Utama management said in a statement today.
They said that when they were initially informed by the Health Ministry of one guard having been found positive through tracing, they had removed all guards under the service provider’s company for re-testing, to redeploy them only after they had been cleared.
This was despite all the guards having been tested when they were first assigned for duty.
In an update on its Facebook page yesterday, the Petaling JPBD had stated that one of those who tested positive was from the mall's management and three shoppers had also tested positive.
Also yesterday, Petaling JPBD chairperson Johary Anuar said 6,000 workers at the shopping complex had been screened, and testing on shoppers there had begun with 110 tested so far.
1 Utama said that they yesterday concluded the test results for the 6,000, and successfully identified 20 staff members from among their tenants and 1 mall management staff as covid positive.
“These 21 persons have been swiftly quarantined by the health ministry to contain the spread and further minimise potential exposure,” said the mall. - The Vibes, October 15, 2020
