KUALA LUMPUR (Aug 7): Malaysia reported 25 new cases of COVID-19 as of noon today, involving 23 Malaysians and two foreigners.

This compares with 15 cases reported yesterday and pushes the tally of active cases to 210, said Health director-general Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah.

Once again no new COVID-19 related death was reported, and the death toll remains at 125.

This gives a mortality rate of 1.38%, based on the total cases in the country which now stands at 9,063.

Noor Hisham said 15 more patients have been discharged, raising the number of recoveries to 8,728. This represents a recovery rate of 96.3%.

The director-general, in a statement, said 16 of the 25 new cases were local transmissions, of which 15 are Malaysians and one is a foreigner.

The remaining nine cases were imported, involving eight Malaysians and one foreigner.

Of the locally transmitted cases, 12 were from the PUI Sivagangga cluster, of which 10 were detected in Perlis, one in Kedah and another one in Penang.

Two cases were detected in Perak from influenza-like illness screening at a sentinel clinic, while one was found in Kuala Lumpur from screening of symptomatic cases and has been admitted to Hospital Sungai Buloh.

“The lone locally transmitted case involving a foreigner was found through screening at a detection centre. The patient is an illegal immigrant in Johor,” said Noor Hisham.

As for the nine imported cases, Noor Hisham said  they involved people who had returned from the Philippines (four cases), United Arab Emirates (one), Turkey (one), Djibouti in East Africa (one), Australia (one) and Yemen (one).

Elaborating on the situation concerning the PUI Sivagangga cluster, Noor Hisham said 3,246 people have been screened as of noon today, of whom 43 have tested positive.

Another 2,230 were negative while the remaining 883 are awaiting results.

He said 1,884 close contacts have been identified and will be sampled in Perlis and Penang.

Providing the breakdown of the cases in the cluster, Noor Hisham said 31 cases were found in Kedah, 11 in Perlis and one case in Penang.

He said the 10 cases from this cluster detected in Perlis are family members of case No 9002 that was reported in Perlis on Aug 4.

“One of the family members – case No 9054 – was a regular customer of a restaurant which belongs to case No 8976 (the index case of PUI Sivagangga).

Meanwhile, one new case in Kedah is the wife of a patient who was detected yesterday.