Rethink approach and implement national testing plan, Pua urges MOH

 

DAP national publicity secretary Tony Pua has urged the Health Ministry (MOH) to rethink its approach to Covid-19 testing in the country and implement a National Testing Plan to fight Covid-19, following a rising positivity rate.

“We call upon the MOH to drastically increase its targeted testing and put in place a national testing plan, as part of a whole of government and whole of nation approach to fighting Covid-19 and its variants.

“This plan is not for the MOH to execute alone, but for all stakeholders including private hospitals, private clinics, factories and workplaces, and even individuals via the now available self-test kits,” said Pua in his statement.

Pua reasoned that it was important for the country to build a national capacity to test at least one percent of the population - that is, roughly 300,000 tests - a day as a contingency to deal with any further outbreaks in the future.

Last night, Malaysia reported 12,366 cases, with a positivity rate of 9.93 percent.

The positivity rate indicates the portion of positive Covid-19 cases detected out of the total tests conducted.

Yesterday's reported 9.93 percent is well above the recommended five percent set by the World Health Organization (WHO), which acts as a barometer to indicate whether a country is containing the spread of Covid-19 well.

DAP national publicity secretary Tony Pua

According to Pua, the MOH had carried out significantly fewer tests in spite of the high and rising positivity rates.

He claimed that the 34 percent reduction in testing - which began on June 20 - had contributed to a major failure to detect tens of thousands of cases in the community, causing more infections to spread, which is reflected in the country’s rising positivity rate.

Pua also said MOH allegedly dismissed multiple calls for mass-scale, nationwide Covid-19 testing since last year, with Health director-general Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah favouring the "targeted" approach in Covid-19 testing.

“However, there is a stark difference between ‘targeted testing’ and ‘limited testing’. What the MOH has in effect been practising is a ‘limited testing’ approach.

“A ‘targeted testing’ approach has to correspond to test outcomes and results.

“When the tests return a positivity above five percent, the targeted testing approach should automatically increase the number of tests to a sample size that will return and reduce the positivity to less than five percent,” said the Damansara MP.

He added that if the positivity rate rises to 10 percent, the testing of targeted samples should double in accordance with the higher rates in order to effectively determine the number of those infected within the community.

Last week, epidemiologist Dr Lokman Hakim Sulaiman said the current find, test, trace, isolate and support (FTTIS) system could no longer apply to the Klang Valley, as it could be assumed that most in the Klang Valley had been exposed to the virus.

- Mkini