Shift focus to Covid-19 hospitalisation rates, says expert

 

Providing hospitalisation figures will help the public keep tabs on the emergence of new variants, says consultant paediatrician Dr Amar-Singh HSS. (Facebook pic)

PETALING JAYA: A health expert has urged the government to sharpen its focus on Covid-19 hospitalisation rates to help the public keep tabs on the emergence of new variants and how severe they are.

Dr Amar-Singh HSS, a consultant paediatrician, told FMT he believed the high vaccination rate in the country had reduced the importance of giving a daily account of infection rates.

A shift of focus to hospitalisation numbers, he said, would give an idea of the current severity of the pandemic and whether a vaccine-resilient variant was emerging.

It would also help the public gauge whether vaccination protection would remain over time, he said.

Fortune magazine recently quoted some experts as saying case numbers did not “adequately represent“ the risk of the disease in the age of Omicron. They suggested that governments stop using daily cases as the key metric.

According to the article, Spain intends to move past daily case counts and Singapore is “coming around to viewing case numbers as less important”.

Amar said Malaysia should “still keep an eye” on the total number of cases as there was a need to keep this as low as possible to minimise the risk of Long Covid.

He said the current concern revolved around unvaccinated children and people with weakened immune systems or chronic illnesses.

Close to 80% of the Malaysian population are fully vaccinated and more than 50% of adults have received their booster shots.

He noted that the risk of an adult being admitted to hospital due to a breakthrough infection with the Omicron variant after being fully vaccinated was 1%.

Most of these breakthrough infections, he said, would not require intensive care.

“With the change in the immune status of the population, the government should look less at the total number of reported cases and move to focusing on and reporting hospitalisation numbers,” he said.

But Sunway University president Dr Sibrandes Poppema, who is an immunopathologist, said any decision to stop keeping tabs on daily cases would be akin to “sticking your head in the sand” since Covid-19 was not yet endemic.

He said there was still a need to count and to sequence sufficient samples to know which variants were around.

“Omicron may cause less severe symptoms but Delta has not been defeated and the emergence of new and more serious variants is not excluded,” he said. - FMT