Be more open, specific on Covid-19 cases, groups tell Putrajaya

 

Bangi MP Ong Kian Ming says the health ministry should provide detailed information on the location history of positive Covid-19 cases.

PETALING JAYA: Public health experts say greater data transparency will help in the fight against Covid-19 by improving the efficiency of contact tracing and enabling researchers to better understand the virus’ characteristics.

In an open letter yesterday, Bangi MP Ong Kian Ming called on the government to release more specific infectivity statistics and detailed information on the location history of positive cases.

Less than a week ago, Dr Narimah Awin, former director of the health ministry’s family health development division, said during a webinar that Malaysians deserved more information than the daily numbers and clusters announced by health director-general Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah every day.

Former health minister Dzulkefly Ahmad also said more data opens up “immense possibilities” for researchers and the medical community, as it would allow them to better synergise information and glean meaningful results.

“Location specific data, for example, would enable researchers to measure the K-Dispersion Rate – a metric used to better understand the transmission in a contained area,” he said.

Research from different countries has revealed that about 80% of infections are caused by less than 20% of patients, which shows that many do not pass the virus on, but those who do tend to infect multiple others at once.

Measuring the K rate locally would allow for more efficient contact tracing, as efforts can be channelled towards close contacts in situations the data shows to be the most conducive for transmission to pre-emptively prevent clusters.

With contact tracers already struggling under the weight of an overwhelmed health system, Dzulkefly said the government, being more open and specific about the whereabouts of positive cases, would also “empower the public to be self-aware”.

“This is particularly important when our contact tracers are outnumbered by the daily number of cases, and can’t reach the close contacts in time,” he said.

In Victoria, Australia, which faced one of the strictest and longest lockdowns in the world before reopening in October, the state government had regularly released detailed information about the time and duration a positive case was at a given location within 24 hours, keeping the public better informed about their need to volunteer for testing.

Epidemiologist Dr Chan Chee Khoon said not only is comprehensive data important, so too is the methodology behind it, as numbers can be influenced by external factors.

“There’s data, and there’s data, if you know what I mean. You can’t take any number at face value, you have to also know how the information was collected and how the number has been generated.”

As an example, he said, the infectivity rate (R0, pronounced R naught) may not be useful in a Malaysian context, as the large number of migrant workers, many of whom are unwilling to come forward for testing for fear of legal consequences, means the raw data being used to devise the figure may be imperfect.

“In my field, we work with numbers a lot, and I know enough about how numbers get generated to be sceptical of any numbers being reported.

“Numbers are important, but don’t get overly fixated on them, because they are contingent on things like context and how information was compiled, which can define how reliable it is and whether it should come with caveats,” he said. - FMT