Testing foreign workers: Why are we running around in circles?

 

Designed by Freepik

We are once more running round in circles regarding the foreign workers

1. We have cases of foreign workers infecting Malaysians
2. Employers are not fully using the Socso subsidy scheme to test their foreign workers
3. We have govt officials making nonsensical suggestions about testing foreign workers
4. There is a recent "not well thought out" report about foreign workers by a think tank

And while all the above is happening, you and I continue to be at risk of being infected by foreign workers.

All because we don’t have a sensible foreign workers testing plan. 

Yet there is a way out as I suggested in my 11 May post.

Let me lay out my case. 

1) Infection by foreign workers

There is no better example of this than the recent barber incident where this Pakistani barber had tested positive by a private hospital.  He was working all the while doing private services house-to-house. 

His contacts included 21 house calls customers, 15 in-shop customers and 4 housemates.  These 40 had to be screened and quarantined.  Pity the customers who became at risk just for a haircut.  Incidentally, my last haircut was the week before MCO and now I am going to keep it long like my university days. 

2) Socso

Socso has this Prehatin programme where employers would be subsidized half the testing fee.  Have you seen the recent status report on this scheme? 

• Based on Socso data, 31,301 foreign workers covering all sectors have been tested. 
• Socso panel is capable of conducting 15,000 tests per day.  

So it meant that the 31,000 could have been tested in 2 days.  There are lots of unused capacity. 

I inferred that employers are not rushing in to make use of this.  

If you are an employer of say 100 foreign workers, and given the RM 300 per test, even with the RM 150 subsidy it will cost you RM 15,000 to send all your workers for testing.

Can you imagine spending this RM 3,000 only to find out that even if none of them is tested positive, you may have to send them again in a week or two for another round?  Is there another round of subsidy?

Our govt has not thought this through.  No employer is going to spend time and money doing an idiotic thing.

3) Govt nonsensical suggestions

Let me illustrate with the barber case.

Our Minister has suggested that we should ask our barber for his test report to show proof that he has been tested negative.  

I would have thought that it would be common knowledge by now that testing negative on one day just meant that you have not been infected on the day of the testing. 

If a barber is tested negative in the morning, he could be infected tonight when he goes home if his housemates who got sick a few days ago has just reached a stage where the viral load is such that he can now infect everyone in the house.

4) Think Tank

There is a recent Khazanah Research Institute report arguing that failure to protect the migrant workers would have an impact on public health and the economy. 

The summary said that we must test, isolate and treat foreign workers.  Have they been sleeping? To do all the research and say things that we are currently doing as if it is something profound.   

There has not been any news that in the testing and treatment, the foreign workers are being treated differently from Malaysians.

You would have thought that the important thing is to come up with specific proposals on how to control the transmission.  Specifically, I am thinking of testing and contact tracing. 

Designed by Freepik

What to do?

The reality is that as long as we have the virus and foreign workers, there will be a risk of infection by foreign workers.  

We don’t have the capacity to test all of them.  No employers want to spend money repeatedly.  Making it mandatory to test foreign workers may improve compliance but it does not address the real issue of the need for repeated testing. 

But there is an alternative that I have suggested in a tongue-in-cheek manner in my May 11 post.  Let me quote from the post"

“One way to do this is for employers to send about 0.1 % of its foreign workers for testing every week.  So if an employer has 100 foreign workers, this means sending one every 2 - 3 months for testing.  This would be equivalent to testing 2,000 - 4,000 foreign workers every week (for the whole country) about the average weekly testing rate for the foreign workers during the MCO.  The main difference is that we will have some form of randomized testing with this plan, be affordable, and be within our testing capacity.”

This plan works on the basis that the foreign workers generally stay together so that we can actually do with a sample test of one or two.  If the results are positive, then MOH can take over to test all the housemates and working colleagues.  If the results are negative, the employer can repeat the sampling test with different workers later.

MOH and the govt with all the statisticians and epidemiologists would be able to work out what is a realistic % to test  than my “finger in the wind" 0.01%

So for those of you who have contacts with MOH or some minister, please send them this post. 

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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.