What’s our anti-Covid-19 festive season plan?
IT is the small gatherings in household settings that are fuelling the Covid-19 surge.
US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) director Dr Robert Redfield raised the alarm a month ago when reports showed that the spread of the virus in the community continued at social and family gatherings where people did not observe physical distancing or wear face masks.
This was due to people assuming that family members and friends were “healthy” and not infected since they did not show any symptoms.
Highly infectious asymptomatic individuals can then infect multiple people at one single gathering. Dr Redfield called it the “silent epidemic” of asymptomatic Covid-19 infections in a tweet on Nov 5.
Size doesn’t matter. Any time people from different households get together, the risk of infection increases regardless of the size of the gathering.
It looks like the virus is spreading in this way in Kelantan. As explained by Health director-general Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah, the spread of infections was caused by travellers to Kelantan who brought the virus from red zones such as the Klang Valley and Negri Sembilan. People from clusters in these red zones returned to the East Coast state and infected others (“Health DG hopes Kelantan residents will stay home”, The Star, Nov 21; online at bit.ly/ star_stayhome).
When the government imposed the conditional movement control order in the Klang Valley on Oct 14, many knowingly travelled from there back to their hometowns, including in Kelantan, before the order came into force.
Asymptomatic people could still be spreading the disease in their hometowns now.
With yearend holidays approaching and the monsoon season already begun, what are Malaysia’s plans to prevent the spread of the virus from the country’s red zones to green zones?
Floods in Kelantan could also affect the number of Covid-19 cases in the state, especially if a major flood occurs and there is a spike in the number of evacuees at temporary relief centres.
The Health Ministry has said that Malaysians should not balik kampung, or return to their hometowns, and Dr Noor Hisham’s advice is to postpone balik kampung plans.
But such advice doesn’t seem to work with some people, which is why there’s a surge of new cases in Kelantan.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson presented his government’s “Covid-19 winter plan” at a Downing Street press conference on Nov 23. The plan presented a programme to suppress the virus, protect the country’s beleaguered National Health Service as well as vulnerable groups, keep education and the economy going, and provide a route back to normality.
So let’s hear from the Malaysian government. Once there is community transmission that is widespread, there is not a lot of good even targeted interventions – whether enhanced MCOs or targeted enhanced MCOs – can do.