See: M’sia needs a solid Covid-19 exit plan
KUCHING: Malaysia needs an exit plan to end the Covid19 pandemic and come up with ‘circuit breakers’ instead of entangling itself in the enforcement of Movement Control Order (MCO), Conditional Movement Control Order (CMCO) and Enhanced Movement Control Order (EMCO), said Batu Lintang assemblyman See Chee How.
The Parti Sarawak Bersatu (PSB) lawmaker said ‘circuit breakers’ is a term devised to described a tight set of restrictions, imposed over a fixed period of time, designed to reverse the tide of the epidemic and bring the number of Covid-19 cases down.
“Unlike an indefinite total lockdown, it is to give hope to the people that such restrictions and measures are temporary, and hence less damaging to the economy and the people’s mental health, that life will soon return to normalcy and everybody can thus plan ahead,” he said in a statement issued after a Facebook Live session yesterday.
See said he observed the temporary or short-term lockdowns or circuit breakers in many countries served to enforce various degrees of restriction to buy some time for the country to impose restrictions and accelerate the performing and execution of measures to manage and get back on top of the pandemic.
As such, he said, it was obvious that ‘circuit breakers’ or short-term restrictive lockdowns such as MCO, CMCO and EMCO in Malaysia were undertaken to enable a nation to be on track to achieve its Covid-19 exit plan, to return the country to normalcy.
“We have undertaken a drastic action to declare a State of Emergency until Aug 1, but is that our Covid-19 exit plan? In devising the National Covid19 Immunisation Programme (NCIP) as ‘a national strategic plan to curb and end the Covid-19 pandemic’, is that our road map or exit plan to be free of the pandemic by February next year? At the end of March, the state government announced that Sarawak will unveil its post-Covid-19 exit strategy within the month of April or May. However, and unfortunately, we have yet to have a Sarawak Covid-19 exit plan,” he said.
See said Singapore, one of the most successful countries in Covid-19 containment, had announced that it was returning to the lockdown-like conditions it last imposed a year ago, banning dining-in and limiting household visitors or gatherings to two people, from May 16 to June 13.
He said Singapore had undertaken this temporary or short-term lockdowns or circuit breakers because the number of new cases in the community had increased to 71 in the past week from 48 in the week before, while the number of unlinked infections had risen to 15 in the past week from seven in the week before.
He said Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Hsien Loong had defended the government’s move, saying the new Covid19 clusters and unlinked community cases in the past fortnight were “very worrying” and that “We are testing more intensively, and doing our utmost to ring-fence the transmissions. But we also need stricter restrictions to stop more cases from popping up.”
Based on the statistics released by the Singapore Ministry of Health as of May 10, See said 1,852,684 Singaporeans had been inoculated with the first dose of Covid-19 vaccine, and 1,284,646 Singaporeans had their second dose of the vaccine.
“With a total population of a little less than six million, administering average of more than 41,000 doses of vaccine a day, almost 42 per cent of their eligible population have had their first dose of Covid-19 vaccine, while almost 30 per cent of their population have now being fully immunised.
“Comparing with Sarawak, the Malaysian Minister of Health had just tweeted last night (Friday) that we have 123,464 eligible Sarawakians who have been vaccinated with the first dose of vaccine, while 69,353 have been inoculated with the second dose, as of May 13.
“It is pathetic that only 71 Sarawakians were vaccinated with their first dose of the vaccine on that day,” he said.
See said the Singapore example was consistent with the global efforts, that the short-term lockdowns or circuit breakers (or MCO, CMCO and EMCO in Malaysia) were for the purpose of buying some time to carry out contact tracing, testing and ringfencing the transmission, to manage and get back on top of the outbreak so as to ensure that the exit plan is put back on track.
On the national front, he said the more stringent MCO had been enforced from May 12 to June 7, and in states like Selangor, vigorous tracing and testing were being carried out.
“It certainly appears that they are more serious to salvage their slips in their exit plan. In Sarawak, we have chosen to enforce a six-day ‘circuit breaker’ but we have not seen any robust effort to pursue tracing and testing in any part of Sarawak.
“Let us not be entangled in the web of all these shortterm restrictive lockdowns of MCO, CMCO, EMCO or impracticable ‘circuit breaker’.
“Let us devise our Sarawak Covid-19 exit plan and strategy, intensify tracing and testing, ring-fence the virus transmissions and do all we can to procure the needed vaccines to ensure that we can curb and end the Covid-19 pandemic in Sarawak,” he said.