Total of 9,918 Covid-19 deaths in M’sia this year

PETALING JAYA: Malaysia has recorded a total of 9,918 Covid-19 deaths so far this year as compared to 471 fatalities in the whole of 2020, says Health Director-general Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah.

“Of the total deaths this year (as of Aug 7), 8,615 deaths or 86.9% were at hospitals while 1,303 deaths – 13.1% – were brought in dead,” he said. He said 210 people had also succumbed to Covid-19 in the last 24-hours, bringing the country’s death toll to 10,389.

He said of the 19,257 new cases reported, 740 cases (3.8%) were in Categories 3, 4 and 5 while the remaining 18,517 cases (96.2%) were in Categories 1 and 2.

Category 1 means a patient is asymptomatic while a Category 2 patient has mild symptoms.

Category 3 denotes cases with pneumonia while those in Category 4 require oxygen to battle pneumonia.

Category 5 patients fall into the critical stage requiring ventilator support. Overall, only 4,178 (21.7%) of the cases reported have a vaccination history with most from Categories 1 and 2.

Of the new cases, 16 were imported cases while 19,241 were local infections.

Selangor continued to record the most cases with 7,084 new infections, followed by Kuala Lumpur with 2,450.

Three other states with more than 1,000 new cases were Kedah (1,514), Sabah (1,255) and Johor (1,182).

The number of active cases now stands at 224,120. Of the active cases, 1,097 are in intensive care units, with 575 requiring ventilator support.

Thirty-six new Covid-19 clusters were also reported, bringing the total number of active clusters to 1,197.

The cumulative number of Covid-19 cases in the country now stands at 1,243,852.

There were also 16,323 recoveries nationwide for a total of 1,009,343 recoveries to date.