Yeo renews call on FTTIS approach, wants Khairy to implement

 

DAP's Bakri MP Yeo Bee Yin has renewed her call for Putrajaya to implement the Find, Test, Trace, Isolate and Support (FTTIS) approach after Khairy Jamaluddin clocked in as the new health minister.

In a statement today, she said the approach must be introduced to supplement the vaccination drive, relied on by Putrajaya in containing Covid-19 as it reopens the country's economy.

"As the government is planning to reopen the economy while managing the spread of Covid-19, it cannot rely solely on vaccination. A multi-pronged strategy is needed and an effective FTTIS is definitely one of the most important elements to be added," Yeo said.

"We’ve been calling for actions to improve FTTIS for more than a year but it has fallen on deaf ears. I hope the newly appointed health minister will be more open to suggestions and act on them," she said.

"Since last year, many health experts and MPs have been calling for more testing to be done according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendation of a positive rate of five percent or lower.

"In fact, countries which are successful in controlling the spread of the virus such as China went way below one percent in their positive rate.

"The Health Ministry has finally released more granular testing numbers which showed that from Aug 11 to 26, the positive rate of all states or territories (except Labuan) recorded above five percent with more than 10 above 10 percent," she said.

Four states - Kedah, Kelantan, Sabah, and Selangor - are above 15 percent, according to Yeo, who is also the former energy, science, technology, environment and climate change minister.

"In short, we are severely under-testing our population and our daily positive cases number, although high, is under-reported.

"Not only that, our contact tracing mechanism is almost fully manual while other countries, which are successful in controlling the spread of virus, are using much better and sophisticated data analytics to allow for more comprehensive tracing to be done on close contacts.

"MyTrace, which is a tracing application launched by our current Minister of Health when he was Minister of Science, has not been making any significant impact in tracing, nor is MySejahtera," she added.

Yeo said the current testing and tracing system is totally incapable of tracing the pattern of spreading of the virus.

"With severely insufficient testing and primitive method in tracing, it is impossible to isolate the positive cases effectively to prevent further spreading in the community," she added.

The health expert and opposition parties have been demanding the government to strengthen the FTTIS approach, which was perceived as the weakest link in Malaysia's pandemic management strategy. 

 - Mkini