SHAH ALAM, July 5 — Dato’ Seri Amirudin Shari says it would take many months for Malaysia to be able to flatten the Covid-19 curve based on the daily cases recorded, Sinar Harian reported today.
The Selangor Menteri Besar said the main objective of the enhanced movement order control (EMCO) that was enforced on the state is to allow health facilities to be able to cope and be able to provide sufficient number of hospital beds, facilities and manpower to treat the Covid-19 patients.
He said the current situation calls for the need to incorporate the approaches that have been studied and tested in fighting the spread of the infection, such as the Find, Test and Trace, Isolate and Support (FTTIS) approach that has been proven to be effective by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in preventing the spread of the virus.
“Selangor remains as the epicentre in the upsurge of positive Covid-19 cases. Honestly, it saddens me to see that Selangor continues to record the highest daily cases.
“(But) Selangor has the largest population in comparison to other states with some 6.57 million residents in the state, and this is excluding people from other states that are working and residing here,” Amirudin was quoted by the Malay daily.
Amirudin said a quarter of the country’s economic activities that are focused in Selangor coupled with the large population also contributes to the high number of daily cases.
“Therefore, the EMCO has to be enforced due to the various economic activities that were allowed to operate during the previous movement restriction.
“It is not a surprise to me (Selangor under EMCO), seeing that the previous efforts had failed to reach its objective to curb the spread of Covid-19 with daily cases reaching between 5,000 to 6,000. A month after the MCO, we only managed to reduce the number of cases by 33 per cent from the total cases of 9,020 registered on May 29,” he said.
The National Security Council had recently ordered the enforcement of the 14-day EMCO in Selangor and Kuala Lumpur beginning July 3, following the continuous spike in Covid-19 cases.
