Bukit Mertajam MP wants bipartisan command council to tackle Covid-19

 

COVID-19 | Bukit Mertajam MP Steven Sim Chee Keong has called on the Perikatan Nasional government to focus its Covid-19 efforts on unclogging the healthcare system and not locking down society.

Sim said despite the various versions of the movement control order (MCO) being implemented, the country has been hit by the worse wave yet. 

"After many cycles of MCO, enhanced MCO, conditional MCO, and recovery MCO, we are, unfortunately, seeing a new, worse, wave of Covid-19 infection," he said in a statement today. 

Sim called for a bipartisan high-level command council, with representatives from the opposition, epidemiologists, as well as experts and stakeholders from other sectors.

"Covid-19 prevention and management strategies should also be decentralised to enable prompt and localised response. Different states have different challenges, conditions, and cultures.

"For the Covid-19 prevention strategy to be effective, local and state governments should be empowered with resources and devolution of power to command state-level strategies as much as possible," he said.

Sim added that his goal was not to point fingers at who is responsible but to plead with the government to listen to experts.

"There are rumours going around stating that the federal government will impose a fresh round of MCO next week. Many have spoken against another full-fledged lockdown like the MCO.

"Some 46 experts, academicians and practitioners from the medical field have recently issued an open letter to the prime minister proposing 10 critical actions for the government to deal with this wave of Covid-19," he said.

He stressed that the ability of our healthcare system to handle the testing, tracing, and treating (3T) of Covid-19 cases is vital in dealing with the problem. 

"Instead of locking down the entire society, the government must work against time to unclog the congestion in our healthcare system to enable quick execution of the 3T work," urged Sim, who was involved last year in the Penang Lawan Covid-19 campaign as its director of communication and community empowerment.

Sim added that as long as the healthcare system is able to quickly execute the 3T, the rest of society can go about their lives at least in the context of the new normal.

"The problem today is the jamming up of our healthcare system, all the way along the stream. Testing cannot be done quick enough, contact tracing is still painfully manual and slow despite most of us dutifully scanning MySejahtera everywhere we go, and there are not enough quarantine facilities," he said.

The whole system, he said, is understaffed with many frontliners in the medical sector exhausted from fighting the pandemic for about a year now.

"Even if we were to go into another lockdown, without dealing with system preparedness, we will eventually go back to square one.

"To unclog the currently congested public healthcare system, the government should mobilise all the help it can get. Many have urged for greater whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches to deal with the pandemic.

"Business as usual obviously did not work and will not work, the government needs more heads at the table, and more hands on deck," he said.

Sim called on the administration to consider roping in the vast network of private clinics and hospitals all over the country to play a role in the 3T work, especially in mass testing, and later, to conduct vaccination.

"The Penang state government recently reached an agreement with the Penang Medical Practitioners Society to enable 100 private clinics in the state to provide free Covid-19 vaccination service to Penangites when the vaccines arrive.

"This is to supplement government clinics to expedite the vaccination exercise," he added. - Mkini