Gov't told to probe, monitor foreign workers for cluster infection

CORONAVIRUS | A Penang state assemblyperson has urged the federal and state government to investigate and monitor the living conditions and movement of foreign workers placed particularly in housing estates.

PKR’s Bukit Tengah elected representative Gooi Hsiao Leung said this is urgent to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 virus to protect foreign workers and the community at large.

Gooi said testing should be made widely available to foreign workers living in the country.

The government, he said, should extend information campaign materials in foreign languages to workers on how to curb the spread of the virus.

"In this critical moment, we cannot afford any cluster outbreaks among the high number of foreign workers living in Malaysia," Gooi said.

"Otherwise all the hard measures taken by the government and the people in implementing the movement control order throughout the entire country to flatten the spread of the virus would be wasted in vain," he added.

"Many of our foreign workers live in deplorable and overcrowded conditions in residential flats and houses all over the country," stressed the former Alor Setar MP.

A survey was recently conducted in Bukit Tengah, a highly industrialised area with 1,800 factories operating.

It revealed that in certain residential areas with a high cluster of foreign workers, up to 30 foreign workers are housed to live together in overcrowded conditions in a single house, Gooi said.

He had raised this problem with the state authorities last week during a district office disaster management meeting, calling for immediate action to tackle this issue.

"These clusters of foreign workers placed in residential areas all over, if unsupervised and not managed properly, will become high-risk areas for cluster outbreaks to occur as what we are seeing happening now in Singapore."

Gooi was referring to the latest incident in Singapore, relating to cluster infection outbreaks in foreign workers’ dormitories.

Such reports should set off alarm bells to our own government, Gooi said.

So far, it has been reported that 20,000 workers living in two dormitories in Singapore have been quarantined.

There are 1.99 million registered foreign workers in Malaysia, while unofficial data suggests that there may be as many as four million unregistered foreign workers.

"Combined, the total number of foreign workers would exceed the total population of Singapore," he said.

Gooi said the majority of Malaysia's foreign workers are employed in the manufacturing sector, followed by the construction, plantation and agriculture sectors.

"Unlike Singapore which makes it mandatory to house unskilled and low skilled foreign workers in purpose-built dormitories, Malaysia has no similar regulations to monitor foreign workers’ movement and living conditions," he added. - Mkini