In theory, it is possible to eliminate the virus since it is not a “living thing” and once there is no “host” to pass the virus, it will be eliminated.
But Malaysia missed the chance of doing it and now it is too late politically and economically to try.
Have other countries succeeded?
I came across two articles about how the virus has been “eliminated” in Wuhan and New Zealand
The first was about how the Wuhan city govt tested all its 9.9 million residents (costing RM 540 m to be shouldered by the Wuhan govt) over a 10 day period and found no confirmed Covid 19 cases.
- However, it found 300 asymptomatic cases that they have isolated. I am actually confused as I would have thought that asymptomatic meant you also had the virus.
- Can you imagine testing 1 million people per day c/w our 10,000 per day?
The second was about New Zealand. As of yesterday, they had zero Covid 19 cases in the country for 15 days. The last one detected was on 22 May.
On the face of it, both these places seemed to have eliminated the virus. In my lingo, there will not be any “spontaneous” cases.
Having confirmed that it is possible to get zero cases, I wanted to see what happened to the few countries that have been praised for their efforts in controlling the virus – Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam.
Sad to say, the virus is still present in these countries as can be seen from the graphs showing the number of daily cases from 1 May.
I had to separate the charts for Vietnam & Taiwan from Korea & Malaysia as the former cases are so low comparatively that they would not come out in the same charts
Vietnam and Taiwan do not seem to have a continuous 14 days of zero cases. They have zero for a few days and then one or two cases re-appear meaning that the virus is still in the country
I am still trying to understand what New Zealand did that was so different from Malaysia.
- NZ went into lockdown when they had 102 cases. No big deal as Malaysia went into MCO when we had 117 cases
- NZ lockdown involved the closure of schools and all non-essential workplaces, a ban on social gathering, and severe travel restrictions. It sounded very much like what we experienced during the MCO.
Yet today NZ is close to declaring that they have eliminated the virus while Malaysia is still coping with 19 to 277 daily cases over the past 7 days.
I think NZ was very lucky.
Malaysia was unfortunate that although we had 117 cases at the start of MCO like NZ, we had this 16,000 people who attended the Sri Petaling event that gave us plenty of headache in terms of contact tracing
I don’t have the numbers of people NZ had to trace. They said that the lockdown gave them time to trace contacts. I would imagine that NZ did not have the 16,000 to start with.
The worst part is that Malaysia not only had to trace the 16,000 people but also their contacts. Imagine the scale of the work. A month later, we had tested 26,000 odd associated with Sri Petaling. That is not all. The total people associated with Sri Petaling that was tested was 46,000 by the end of May.
It is the sheer numbers that NZ never had to contend with.
These large numbers in Malaysia meant more asymptomatic cases i.e possibly more sick people were not detected during the MCO phases and these became the seeds for the many "spontaneous cases" we experienced currently.
Today with the relaxation, I would think it is impossible to eliminate the virus unless we have another MCO.
But the second MCO will not happen given the economic cost. Besides we have gotten used to living with a situation where the virus numbers seem manageable in terms of our treatment capacity as well as our contact tracing capacity. So it would be politically difficult to justify another MCO just to eliminate the virus.
I will go so far to say that if after lifting the lockdown New Zealand gets a few cases (maybe due to imports), I am sure that they will also not go through another lockdown just to eliminate the virus again.
Conclusion – We were unlucky and having missed the boat in eliminating the virus, it is not politically and economically acceptable to the rakyat to go through another MCO just to try to eliminate the virus. So we just have to live with it.
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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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