PETALING JAYA: Former deputy health minister Dr Lee Boon Chye has urged the government to improve its collection of data to find out why the lockdown has not resulted in an appreciable reduction of Covid-19 cases.
Noting that the third round of the nationwide MCO came into force more than six weeks ago, he said the infection numbers should have come down drastically by now.
Lee told FMT there was apparently a lack of data to allow an analysis of the reasons for the MCO’s failure to curb infections.
He said there was a need to look separately at data on workplace and community infections to pinpoint trends in the spread of infections.
If factory workplace clusters were contributing the most number of cases, he said, the government would have to consider entire factory operations, including transportation of workers and conditions at workers’ hostels.
“Guide factory owners to improve hostel conditions. It will cost companies less money to improve hostels than to shut down operations,” he said.
Lee said that if most of the infections were from the community, the government needed to list down events that were causing the spread of infections.
“People may be going out because they are starving and get infected or there may be SOP fatigue,” he said.
“Unless and until we know the reasons and work on improving them, more restrictive movements will not work. More lockdowns are not going to bring the cases down. They will just hit the economy.”
He called for a review of SOPs, saying they were “clearly not working”.
He said it was unfair to allow the operation of big factories which might be the main contributor to high Covid-19 numbers and to force small businessmen to shut their shops. - FMT
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