Health DG: New Covid-19 clusters are 4th or 5th gen infections from Sri Petaling

CORONAVIRUS | The new clusters among the 150 Covid-19 cases confirmed positive today include fourth and fifth-generation clusters from the Sri Petaling tabligh gathering, said Health Ministry director-general Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah.

“The new clusters will be indirectly related to (the gathering), whether it is the fourth or fifth-generation.

“So we can see the spread is all over, mainly because these people from the (Sri Petaling) group goes to the mosque and these (other) mosque-goers get infected as well,” he said in a press conference in Putrajaya today.

Of the 150 new cases today, 61 of them are related to the Sri Petaling tabligh cluster.

“The numbers we see now from the Sri Petaling group have gone into the fifth generation, no more first generation.

“Within a period of one month, the expansion, we are seeing the results of a fifth-generation (cluster),” he said.

Fourth or fifth-generation infections means that an individual who attended the Sri Petaling religious gathering has infected someone else, who then went on to infect another person who then infected yet another individual.

The latest update on the Sri Petaling cluster is that the ministry has screened 17,965 people and taken samples from 12,842 people, with 1,254 confirmed positive for Covid-19.

This means 7,084 people tested negative for the disease while 4,504 more individuals have their results pending.

Noor Hisham said there are 5,123 more who have yet to go through the testing.

Meanwhile, he said the 100,000 test kits they just received from China are not rapid test kits which measure antibodies.

“The test kits we got (from China) are not the rapid test kits. The accuracy (of the rapid test kit) is 30 percent,” he said.

The test kits from China, he said, utilises polymerase chain reaction (PCR) which measures the antigen or whether the virus is present in the patient’s body, he said.

“It is not a rapid test kit, but it is a PCR test kit,” he assured.

Currently, the ministry is able to test up to 7,500 cases per day, but Noor Hisham hopes to increase this number to 16,500 per day by April.

The 100,000 test kits from China, which was approved by the US Food and Drug Administrator, will be evaluated by the ministry.

The ministry has also received Covid-19 test kits from South Korea and would be evaluating its effectiveness as well.

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- Mkini