KUCHING: Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin has agreed to the formation of a Health and Scientific Covid-19 Advisory Group to advise the government on matters related to the pandemic.
Responding to an open letter undersigned by a list of prominent local health professionals, Muhyiddin called upon the group of health experts to nominate suitable candidates to be members of the advisory group, and to meet with him personally on addressing the Covid-19 outbreak in the country.
Muhyiddin Yassin
“I would be open to listen to your advice and ideas so that we can all collectively contribute to reduce the number of infections and subsequent impact on the lives of the people,” said Muhyiddin in a statement released last night.
He said the government was already aware of the many concerns and proposals raised during a meeting between the group of health professionals and Health director-general Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah in December last year, and such concerns and proposals had already been or in the process of being addressed.
With respect to testing approaches, Muhyiddin said since June last year, the Ministry of Health (MoH) had been using RTK-Ag as a screening test in the community and the country, at the time, was among the first few in the world that had used the RTK-Ag as a screening test.
“The RTK-Ag test kits were evaluated by the National Public Health Laboratory (NPHL) and the Institute of Medical Research (IMR) to ensure compliance with the standards required and later, approved by the Medical Device Authority (MDA) for wider use in the community.”
Muhyiddin said in line with the World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines, the RTK-Ag had been used as a confirmatory result when prevalence of Covid-19 was noted to be high in certain areas or populations.
“RTK-Ag test had been used as a confirmatory test in Sabah since Oct 5, 2020. Furthermore, MoH has set up five RTK-Ag testing centres in Sabah to increase the capacity of the RTK-Ag testing.”
Muhyiddin said as at Jan 14 this year, a total of 365,740 RTK-Ag tests had been conducted with positivity rate of 3.75 per cent, and the action had facilitated MoH in managing the outbreak in Sabah.
“We were able to identify the positive cases early, isolate and treat them and speed up contact-tracing activities to reduce the spread of the disease to the community.”
On the Covid-19 infections among foreign workers, Muhyiddin said the MoH, together with Social Security Organisation (Socso), had conducted mass-testing using RTK-Ag – enabling the government to detect positive cases early and effectively curbing the spread of infection via isolation.
“Up to Jan 13, 146,083 RTK-Ag tests had been done for foreign workers under the Socso screening programme, with two per cent positivity rate and subsequent isolation.”
Moreover, Muhyiddin pointed out the laboratory capacity in the country had been enhanced to an average of 60,000 tests per day with the participation of private laboratories under strict monitoring by MoH – employing both Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) and the RTK-Ag tests.
Moreover, he said the MoH had been researching alternative methods of testing, such as via saliva testing and other new methods available in the market.
“The MoH labs also routinely conduct testing to identify new variants of Covid-19 strains in Malaysia; thus enabling MoH to further improve its management strategies.”
He said decanting patients to private hospitals would also help to reduce pressure on public hospitals and protect the already-heavily burdened healthcare workers there.
“For a start, the Minister of Finance, the Director-General of Health and other senior government officials have held a discussion with senior management of private hospitals, owned by government-linked companies, to kick start the decanting initiative.”
Muhyiddin further added Dr Noor Hisham had held discussions with other private hospital operators via video call, which was attended by almost 400 participants, to kick off the implementation of the decanting initiative.
He said the increased movement of people and poor compliance of standard operating procedures (SOPs), beginning with the Sabah state election, had led to a third-wave of Covid-19 cases to be declared in September last year.
The rising number of cases eventually forced the government to take more stringent measures such as the Proclamation of Emergency by the Yang di-Pertuan Agong, in effect until Aug 1.
Nonetheless, Muhyiddin stressed his administration’s primary focus remained on managing the nation’s response to the pandemic and mitigating the stark social and economic consequences.
“I will continue to put aside politics, focus on working across society to end this pandemic and shepherding the country through difficult recovery that must follow,” said the Prime Minister.