More Covid mysteries

I have a quiz for you.

  

The chart below shows the number of daily cases for the past 9 days excluding the returnees and those from the detention centre.  

You will see that overall, the number of foreign workers with Covid 19 was more than the number of locals.  It is actually 73 cases c/w 51 cases respectively.

 

The other thing you will notice is that the foreign workers tend to have more spikes ie more likely to be clustered cases.

Now comes the quiz.  Which group would have larger numbers of contacts to trace?  Alternatively, do you think that we would have more problems tracing the contacts of foreign workers than those of the locals.?

Keep in mind that MOH yesterday reported zero local cases for the first time.

So if you are put in charge of trying to get people to download a contact tracing app, which group would be your first target?

If you said foreign workers, then you don’t qualify to be a Malaysian Minister.  You are thinking too logically.

OK, I am being facetious, but the reality is that the govt is giving RM 50 incentives to Malaysians only to download the MySejarahtera contact tracing app. 

If what MOH said is true ie that we are not going to have many Malaysians getting Covid, don’t you think that we are just throwing away money?

I would have thought that we should be giving incentives to the foreign workers first to download the contact tracing app…Ya we will have to change the name to maybe GlobalSejahtera. 

I am also sure that we probably can get away with giving less than RM 50.

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OK. A couple of mysteries for you to solve.

1) Yesterday we had Rapid KL first announcing that based on the Transport Ministry SOP, all the trains will operate at full capacity.   It went further on to say that commuters are no longer required to adhere to social distancing rules.

A few hours later the Defense Miniter came out to say that Rapid KL did not get permission from the govt to end social distancing rules.   Of course, Rapid KL had to do an about-turn

So does it mean that the Transport Ministry is not part of the govt?

2) The second mystery is the testing for Covid 19

The chart below shows the number of cumulative tests for Malaysia as reported daily by Worldodometer.

 

You will notice that there are days (at the left-hand side and towards the right-hand side) where the cum no of cases remained unchanged for several days.  

I interpret that there was no info from the govt on such days.  Eventually, there was a jump in number as the updated info is provided. 

I wonder why there is no daily reporting for some of the days.  No doubt if you work out the average you get

• 6,600 daily cases for the first missing period
• 8232 daily cases for the second missing period

The numbers look similar to the number of daily tests for those days with the daily info. I do hope it is some admin error and not some conspiracy theory about trying to hide the numbers for some days. 

3) The other mystery that I have not gotten an answer is that given out current 35,000 daily testing capacity, why are the number of daily tests so low? I keep asking this question. 

If this is cos of the targeted testing protocol ie no cases or clusters meant no need to test, shouldn’t MOH be thinking of another testing plan to make use of the spare capacity so that we can prevent more “spontaneous” cases?  

You want proof of what I am saying?  

Yesterday MOH reported that the govt and private labs combined have the capacity to conduct 34,951 tests a day.  A total of 10,216 tests were conducted by the govt yesterday.

However, the private labs have yet to provide the number of tests they conducted yesterday.  I would guess that the private labs capacity and hence the number of tests would probably be lower than those of the govt.

Isn't this proof that there is unused testing capacity?

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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.