On Mon, NST had the headline “Malaysia’s health chief warns against discrimination of migrant workers amid coronavirus outbreak at detention centres”.
This actually an ironic headline because MOH provides specific information (almost daily currently) on the number of cases from the foreign workers' community whereas it does not do so by race when it comes to Malaysian cases.
There are actually no public/media reports by ethnicity when it comes to Malaysian cases. Rather and even before the foreign workers became a news piece, MOH reported the incidents by clusters and by districts.
From the risk mitigation perspective, this is the correct way to inform the public. We all want to know where to avoid going and what sort of events to avoid. I don’t see how knowing how many foreign workers are infected is going to help the general public as we come into contact with foreign workers in our daily lives.
As a simple case in point, many of us have foreign domestic help. When the MCO ends and they can go out on their off days, are we going to say that they cannot get in touch with their country-person or other foreigners? Or should we follow Singapore where according to the government, the domestic help should still stay at home on their rest days even after the lockdown is relaxed?
So, if the government is concerned about this discrimination of the foreign workers, MOH should stop this foreign-local reporting and focus on clusters and/or location.
Now that the number of daily cases has been brought down to a manageable number of daily cases, MOH should see how cluster information can be released earlier. Cluster classification is of course related to contact tracing work and so how fast new clusters are identified provides a clue on how well we are doing in contact tracing. Since I don’t have any further data on this on top of what I have covered in my last Sunday posting Have we improved contact tracing, I won’t belabour the point.
When I talk about “manageable” numbers above, my reference is not that we want to manage the number of cases to zero. Rather as Covid 19 is a long-term problem, I see “manageable” from 2 perspectives
- In the context of clusters, we would want MOH to keep the total number of cases to be within 1 to 2 generations. I think we are reaching this performance level as per my last Sunday posting. Of course, we have to accept that given our targeted testing protocol, by the time the index case(s) are detected, the infection would have spread. So, we rely on our contact tracing system to catch them all before they lead to any exponential growth. In other words, expect cases from such clusters but there is no need to be alarmed.
- In the context of sporadic or non-community spread (i.e. we don’t know where or who the source of infection), if we keep such cases to 25 – 30 daily cases, based on the MOH model we can avoid an exponential growth. (Refer to my 14 May posting The tricky business of estimating a reliable RO Reproduction Number ). How are we doing on this front? As can be seen from the chart below, we are operating below the critical level with an average14 new daily cases for the past 11 days. (Refer to my posting of 8 Are we tracking the right things and 14 May for the number of cases for the earlier periods)
Note:a) Derived by deducting total cases from those reported for clusters and returnees.b) For 22 May, there was zero case due to this community/sporadic spread.
So, on both the cluster and community spread fronts the data suggests the Covid 19 cases are “manageable”.
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PS: This blog is for me to better understand COVID 19 as this will impact my investments. If you are also into equities, follow me at i4value.asia
Disclaimer: I am not an epidemiologist, healthcare
worker, pharmacist or staff in the Ministry of Health, but rather is someone
with a strong interest in numerical analysis.
The content is an attempt to understand what is happening in the battle
against Covid 19 from a data-based perspective. The opinions expressed here are
based on information extracted from readily available public sources but I do
not warrant its completeness or accuracy and should not be relied on as such.
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