MP alleges govt misleading public that Covid-19 status improving

 

Tanjong Malim MP Chang Lih Kang alleged the government was misleading the public with claims that the Covid-19 situation in the country was improving.

The PKR lawmaker said this was based on the fact that the number of tests had gone down during the Chinese New Year period.

"On Feb 3 and 5, the number of daily Covid-19 tests exceeded 60,000. On Feb 8, it fell drastically to 32,536,"

"Yesterday (Feb 15), the tests on individuals were amongst the lowest at 23,791 only. The fall in positive cases is due to less testing, not due to the pandemic being under control," he said in a statement.

It should be noted that the number of tests between Feb 10 to 12 ranged between 54,000 and 62,000 a day but fell to under 30,000 from Feb 13 to 15. The country has a testing capacity of 76,805 a day.

Chang said that based on the testing figures, the positivity rates on Feb 13, 14, and 15 were at 11.94 percent, 10.15 percent, and 9.15 percent respectively.

He pointed out that the World Health Organisation's definition of keeping the pandemic under control requires a positivity rate of under five percent.

The PKR vice president said the government should not play politics and urged Health Minister Adham Baba to resign.

Relying on testing statistics to determine the state of the pandemic can be challenging in the short term due to the large variation of daily tests in Malaysia, resulting in significant fluctuations.

This is compounded by the fact that the reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests take a few days for results to show.

The infectivity rate is calculated by dividing the number of new Covid-19 cases by the number of tests on the same day but it should be noted that the new cases themselves were the result of tests from earlier days.

That means, if a large number of tests were conducted on a particular day, which will likely produce a higher number of positive cases, the results will only be known a few days later.

And if those results (new positive cases) are made available on a day where the number of tests is low, that could lead to an inflated infectivity rate.

Conversely, the opposite scenario could lead to deflated infectivity rate.

A more stable measure is the number of patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) or deaths due to Covid-19, although this may have around a week's time lag as severe symptoms do not manifest immediately.

The number of ICU patients yesterday was at 260, down from a peak of 319 on Jan 30.

There were also 93 deaths from Covid-19 last week compared to 112 deaths the week before. - Mkini