Health DG: War on Covid-19 still on, MoH continues screening high risk groups

Thursday 02 May 2024

KUALA LUMPUR (April 18): Despite the number of new cases dropping to a double digit thrice since the start of the third phase of the Movement Control Order (MCO), the Ministry of Health (MoH) director-general Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah warns that the war to combat the Covid-19 virus is far from ending.

In his daily press conference today, Noor Hisham reiterated that the MoH will continue to widen its screening and testing within the targeted group that it has identified, maintaining that the ministry's approach is to do mass screening on targeted high risk groups.

Noor Hisham assured the public that the ministry is embarking on a big-scale screening of foreign workers in the country, taking a cue from the lessons learnt in neighbouring country Singapore, where the daily new cases soared to 942 today and total infection number increased to 5,992 — the third highest in Asean.

Noor Hisham announced that certain locations in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor will also be identified for mass screening. Selangor is the state with the highest number of infections at 1,329, followed by Kuala Lumpur (952) as at April 16.

Madrasah (Islamic school) and tahfiz schools are another target group that the MoH is screening given the likelihood that students might have close contact with infected attendees of the three-day tabligh assembly at Seri Petaling Mosque between Feb 27 and March 1.

He said the ministry has identified 197 tahfiz schools nationwide with 11,045 tahfiz students.

"So far we have screened 3,892 (students), of whom 277 were positive and we hope that we will continue the screening in this group as well," he said. According to him, the incidence rate for this group is about 7.1%. However, it is noted that the incidence rate for close contacts of the tabligh cluster is about 30%.

Noor Hisham said the ministry has so far screened more than 105,000 people in the country, 5,305 of whom tested positive. This represents an incidence rate of about 5%, which is fairly low in his opinion.

To a question on whether the MCO should end soon, Noor Hisham, an endocrine surgeon, reminded Malaysians not to be complacent and continue complying with the MCO. He stressed that the public should be adhering to the ministry's guidelines by practising social distancing and high personal hygiene such as washing hands as often as possible with soap and water.

"Although we think that the number of cases has been well controlled within these two weeks, it's not over yet. The war is still on, we have not won the war yet. Life goes on but we have to manage our environment as well as our situation well.

"Life would not be the same even after we complete the third phase of MCO. This means that we still have to comply with certain health regulations and precautions so we can reduce the risk of infections," he said.

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