The Covid war is not over and many Malaysians are still reacting to new restrictions.

MOH said that if we have 28 continuous days without any Covid 19 cases, then we have won the war.

I think it is still a long road ahead considering that we have about 30 odd cases daily for the past 2 days.

 

For those who think that the Covid cases will go away soon, you should look at the latest weekly chart below.  It shows that for the past 3 weeks, the number of weekly cases is not on a downtrend.

I have long given up on daily cases as there is too much “noise”.  It appears that our test results come out in batches and then we suddenly have a jump of several cases within a cluster. 

So weekly data makes more sense.

Looking at the chart, I will maintain that we are in “plateau” territory and until we see a clear downtrend, any talk of being Covid free is wishful thinking.  

The numbers don’t lie.  It is not like people’s opinion that is illustrated by the Ipsos story below. 

Ipsos (a global market research company) had a report a few days ago about how people in 6 countries in the region are adapting to a Covid life. 

Ipsos has summarized the peoples’ opinions into 6 stages with No 1 as “pandemic not here” to stage 6 as the “pandemic is behind”.  Stage 6 is supposed to be the “best”. 

• Stage 6 – I feel the pandemic is behind me

• Stage 5 – I see signs that things are improving

• Stage 4 – I have adapted to the restrictions

• Stage 3 – I am reacting day by day to new restrictions

• Stage 2 – I am getting ready for new restrictions

• Stage 1 – The pandemic has not reached me

The results are

• People in Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand feel that they are in stage 4

• Vietnamese feel that they are in stage 6

• Malaysians feel that they are in stage 3

I find it strange that people in Indonesia, Singapore or even the Philippines feel that they are more “ready” than Malaysians given that in terms of cases per million population, these countries are not much better than Malaysia.  You can see it from the table (and I suspect Indonesia and Philippines numbers)

Country	No of Covid cases per mill pop (a)	GCI  ranking (b)
Vietnam	3	13
Thailand	45	2
Indonesia	129	78
Philippines	221	112
Malaysia	259	12
Singapore	6735	126

Notes

a) Worldodometer as at 12 Jun 2020

b) On 10 June.  This Global Covid Index (GCI) created by Malaysia looks at the severity and recovery of the Covid cases.  The ranking is based on the total scores for each country.  The No 1 rank is the best currently occupied by Australia.  FYI, NZ is ranked 6 while the USA is ranked 128. 

The other thing is that based on the GCI ranking which looks at how countries are coping with Covid 19, Malaysia outperformed Indonesia, Philippines and Singapore. 

I don’t want to go into the argument about whether the survey is correctly done but since it is a survey of opinions, I can only conclude that Malaysians feel that they are worse off than Singaporean, Indonesians, Thais, and Filipinos is due to the govt fault

We have too many about turns, uninformative newspaper reports, states fighting with the Federal and questions about how long the current govt will last. 

Ya.  It is a PR problem and is not reflective that in terms of actually combating Covid we have a better track record.  

Very sad. 

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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.