561 Covid-19 cases, 2 deaths reported

PETALING JAYA: The health ministry has reported 561 new Covid-19 cases and two deaths over the past 24 hours. The two deaths were Malaysian men aged 63 and 67 who died in hospital in Sabah.

Health director-general Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said there were 133 recoveries, bringing the total number of those discharged to 10,913, or 69.7% of the total infections.

Noor Hisham said the 561 new cases bring the total number of infections in the country to 15,657.

A total of 4,587 cases are still being treated. Ninety of them are in the intensive care unit, with 29 requiring respiratory assistance.

The two deaths bring the toll to 157, or 1% of the total number of cases.

Almost all the new cases were local transmissions, except eight imported cases involving foreigners from Indonesia, China, Singapore, Cambodia and Saudi Arabia.

Sabah, Selangor and Kedah worst-hit states

Of the new cases reported today, Sabah had the most cases (488), followed by Selangor (25) and Kedah (16).

Fifty of the cases in Sabah were detected from the newly identified Surat, Kasih and Khazanah clusters. The rest were reported from Covid-19 screenings throughout the state.

Eleven cases in Selangor were from active clusters and three were reported to come from the new Sungei Way cluster. Another two were cases that returned from Sabah and the rest were detected through screenings.

In Kedah, 15 of the cases came from the Tembok cluster and one was a close contact of a positive case.

There were less than 10 cases each in Kuala Lumpur, Labuan, Johor, Melaka, Terengganu, Perak and Penang.

Noor Hisham urged health and medical staff throughout the country, especially those from private hospitals and clinics, to volunteer themselves and help frontliners manage the Covid-19 outbreak in Sabah.

“There is also a need for volunteers in the Peninsula, but we can see that 75% of the cases reported are from Sabah, so there is a need for more (volunteers there).”

He said the health ministry predicted it would take a long time before the country could contain the third wave of infections. As such, more volunteers were required to avoid exhausting the nation’s frontliners.

As of now, he said the health ministry had mobilised a total of 483 health personnel from various states to assist with the increasing number of patients in Sabah.

-FMT