No MCO, the rakyat and nation are bleeding

[superadmin]

MCOs inflict devastating damage on the individual, family, community and national economic activity, severely impacting daily livelihoods and driving families and communities to below the poverty line.

With the health ministry’s (MOH) embargo on Covid-19 data, it is virtually impossible to decipher the rationale for extending the CMCO from Nov 9 to Dec 6.

What is the matrix used by the National Security Council (MKN) or MOH to justify the extension? We searched extensively for the science behind the move, to no avail.

Assisted by our Public Health (PH) and Infectious Diseases (ID) colleagues, we would like to offer data and trends captured from MOH’s statistics in the public domain that make the CMCO untenable.

Understanding the data

Absolute numbers of Covid-19 cases in any one state is not a useful parameter. It needs to be expressed as a proportion of the state’s population.

The Infectivity Rate (IR) by state is the number of active Covid-19 cases per 1000 population. The IR in the Klang Valley, Selangor (0.295), Putrajaya (0.294) and KL (0.101) are well below the national average of 0.414 under the current CMCO.

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