Don’t panic, look at Covid-19 numbers in context

 

From Louis Kang

At first glance, the daily Covid-19 infections at 12,541 cases on July 17 looked alarming. After over six weeks being holed up at home from the full lockdown under the movement control order (MCO 3.0), not only were the new cases not coming down, they had gone up – and on many days, setting record highs.

But a closer examination of the daily new infections reveal that there’s no cause for unnecessary panic. Of the new cases that day, 98.5% involved those with either no symptoms (classified as Category 1 by the health ministry) or mild symptoms (Category 2). They comprise 6,504 of the former and 5,848 of the latter.

There were only 86 new patients (0.7%) at Category 3, which meant their lungs had been infected. There were 49 new Category 4 patients (0.4%), while 54 were in Category 5 (0.4%). Category 4 refers to Covid-19 patients requiring oxygen therapy while Category 5 are critical patients needing ventilator support.

Put in another way, the overwhelming number of new infections on that day had little or no symptoms. This is not to trivialise a global pandemic that has killed over four million people worldwide and over 7,000 in Malaysia. But if we get unnecessarily worked up over statistics without contextualising them, we may end up with the wrong strategy in containing this outbreak.

We need to look beyond the daily new cases, especially as our vaccination efforts have been ramped up to almost half a million doses per day. Studies worldwide have shown that while those vaccinated may still get infected with Covid-19, they are likely to suffer mild or no symptoms.

In the United Kingdom, where over 87% of its population has received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccines, the number of new positive cases remains high. On July 17, there were 54,674 new infections in the country, more than four times that of Malaysia’s 12,528 on the same day, despite having a population twice the size of ours.

The United Kingdom is going ahead and lifting Covid-19 restrictions from today (July 19). The British have already accepted the fact that it isn’t the daily new infections that matter. What matters is the number of deaths and patients needing critical care, which has fallen drastically.

As of July 18, some 14 million or 40% of the Malaysian population have received at least one dose of the vaccine, of which 4.4 million (18.9%) have been fully vaccinated with both doses. We are on track to achieving herd immunity by year-end, if not earlier.

With that in mind, the health ministry should continue with its daily breakdown report on the various categories of Covid-19 infections. This will go some way in allaying unnecessary fears and help contextualise the government’s milestones in our war against Covid-19. - FMT

Louis Kang is an FMT reader.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.