Update daily Covid-19 statistics by including test numbers, says Pua

 

Damansara MP Tony Pua says Malaysia’s positivity rate is more than double the 5% benchmark recommended by WHO.

PETALING JAYA: The director-general of health must update his daily Covid-19 reporting statistics to include the total number of corresponding test samples, Damansara MP Tony Pua said.

It would even be better, he said, if the test samples and resultant positivity data were reported as weekly trending data to “remove data lumpiness and statistical noise”.

“Malaysians will (then) be able to see clearly if the health ministry has been carrying out sufficient tests, especially since the current positivity rate of more than 12% is more than double the 5% benchmark recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO),” he said in a statement today.

Pua, of DAP, said the ministry should also include new statistics in its daily reports given the changing pandemic landscape since it first surfaced more than a year ago.

He noted that health director-general Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah included in his daily statement the total number of cases warded in the intensive care unit (ICU), the number of cases who required ventilators as well as the number of deaths for the previous 24 hours.

“It will be extremely useful if these data can also be accompanied by vaccination data, as to whether the patients have received partial or full doses of the vaccines.

“The health director-general has also recently updated his daily reporting format to include daily numbers of patient categories (Cat 1 to Cat 5) to classify newly positive cases for the day.

“However, as my colleague, Dr Kelvin Yii (Bandar Kuching MP) pointed out a few days ago, a patient who was first identified as Cat 2, his or her condition could very well deteriorate to Cat 4 in a few days,” he said.

Hence, he said it would be better for the ministry to categorise all active cases on a daily basis instead of just new daily cases.

Pua said through daily reporting of categories, the dynamics of patients can be seen, in terms of whether there was a high prevalence of deterioration or even improvements during that period of time.

He also said the data should be made available at a granular level by state and districts at GitHub so that policy-makers and data analysts would be able to prescribe remedies at a targeted level.

He added that other information which was perhaps more important in the past, but less so today, could perhaps be made available at GitHub for data analysts to crunch further, instead of being part of the health director-general’s daily statement.

“This is because, on their own, they may provide a distortionary view of the circumstances. This will include cluster information which is still being reported daily. The reason why the cluster information may be distortionary is that the labelled clusters only form less than half of the total incidence of Covid-19 positive cases.

“Hence, reliable conclusions cannot be derived from the currently reported cluster information (for example, total clusters, total new clusters, total ended clusters, total active clusters).”

He said more accurate data, with a stronger emphasis placed on ICU, ventilator and death statistics instead of the daily total new Covid-19 figure, would also go a long way towards helping shift the Malaysian paradigm from one focused on “Zero Covid-19” to one which understands the “new normal” where there will always be perhaps several thousand cases.

“But, that is acceptable as long as the number of cases in ICU, (those) requiring ventilator, and deaths are brought down to a minimum,” he said. - FMT