We’re learning from successes and mistakes from China team - Health DG

CORONAVIRUS | Health Ministry director-general Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said they are learning from both the successes and mistakes in tackling Covid-19 from the team of eight medical experts who just arrived from China yesterday.

“What we see is that we can discuss in terms of treatment as well as research and not just positive things.

“Maybe there are some things they implemented which were not successful. We also want to learn about such things so that we will not repeat them,” he said in the daily Health Ministry press conference on Covid-19 in Putrajaya today.

Noor Hisham stressed that the China team was not here to treat patients, but to exchange information and experience.

When asked whether Malaysia is conducting enough screening, he said we were well within the benchmark set by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

“In the WHO’s report, (they said) if we were to screen 100 people and 50 of them were positive, that means there are many more in the community who we have not detected.

“That means, for example, if 50 percent of the cases were positive, that means we need to step up our screening, it is not enough.

“So the WHO’s benchmark for us says it is enough to reach 10 percent but our success is five percent,” he said.

Noor Hisham (photo) reminded that Malaysia has screened and tested more than 105,000 cases but only 5,389 cases were positive, which is about five percent of the total cases tested.

Other countries, he added, have their figures around six or seven percent.

“So if we look at our five percent, that means we have fulfilled the benchmark set by WHO which is 10 percent. We have less than 10 percent.

“But the way we did it was through a targeted approach on location and groups such as patients under investigation (PUIs) and close contact groups,” he said.

Providing further detail, he said when they test close contact groups, about 31 percent of them are positive, whereas less than 10 percent of the tabligh cluster tested positive and only eight percent of the tahfiz school cluster tested positive.

So on average, he said, the total percentage of cases which are positive out of the cases tested is about five percent.

“In that sense, I think it is good enough but what is more important now is, if we look at the first and second phase of the MCO, we have successfully lowered the positive cases.

“Now we have gone down to two digits (new cases every day), so we need to step up our efforts in the third phase of the MCO so we can control and further lower the number of positive cases,” he said.

Noor Hisham also commented on the 11 temporary prisons for the MCO which will begin operation on April 23.

He assured that all prisons have assigned doctors stationed there and that the Health Ministry is ready to cooperate with the Prisons Department as well as the National Security Council (NSC) to maintain the health and wellbeing of those being imprisoned there.

Earlier, Senior Minister Ismail Sabri had said the Home Ministry has gazetted 11 temporary prisons to hold MCO offenders, and these prisons will begin operating on April 23. - Mkini