Yesterday I talked about how some of the countries who had re-opened the schools found that they had to close down the schools again because of the new cases among the school children.
So what will happen to Malaysia then when the school re-opens and Covid-19 cases are detected among the student population? Are we going to follow the example of countries I shown earlier to close down the whole school?
The risks in schools are in 2 ways
- The students spreading among themselves
- The students spreading to the parents and/or general public when they go home
I think that in the Tahfiz cluster cases, MOH tested all contacts and quarantined them. But this was in the MCO days.
If there is an infection in schools, I would imagine that MOH would have to respond in the same way as any cluster and isolate everyone.
We shall wait and see whether there will be any cases in the schools.
In theory, if from now till the school opening date of 15 July, if we continue to maintain very low cases among Malaysians, the risk of infection in the school would be low.
And even if there are local cases over the next 2 weeks among families with school-going children, I would imagine that MOH will isolate and prevent any children from such cases from going to school.
I saw a Washington Post report that there are also countries that have re-opened schools that did not have any Covid-19 cases. These included Denmark and New Zealand
- for 2 weeks before re-opening schools, Denmark had 3,574 cases
- for 2 weeks before re-opening schools, New Zealand had 12 cases
In Denmark classes were split in two to keep two metres between each child, more lessons taught outside, and a rigorous hand-sanitizing regime – has not led to a spike in cases among staff.
So there are ways to open schools safely even if the cases are still high.
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I have been tracking the number of daily tests reported by Worldodometer and I keep seeing the funny pattern as per below.
Worldodometer reports the cumulative number of tests every day and I obtain the daily number by deducting the previous days cum number from the current day cum number.
So where there are days when the cum number remained that same as the previous day, the computed daily number of test is zero.
You can see that for Jun, we have periods where there are zero daily tests and this is followed by a spike as all the backlog of tests came in.
Even on Fri we had zero testing reported
In mid-May, MOH said that the country (both the govt and private sector) have ported into a new national test reporting system.
So looking at the chart pattern, I would say that the reporting system is not working properly as we all know that there are tests carried out every day.
The authorities have to sort this out.
The admin issue is not why I am bringing this up. My main worry is that if there are reporting gaps, then the number of daily cases reported may not be accurate and we could be lulled into a false sense of security ie zero or low daily cases could be because the test results have not come in yet.
The good news is that despite this reporting error (hopefully it is a reporting error and not some major screw up in the testing capacity), the positivity rate ie number tested positive divided by the total number of tests keep improving.
Month Positivity rate
Apr 2.65 %
May 0.45 %
June 0.38 %
Overall from the start of virus 1.10 %
WHO standard is to have it below 10%.
The overall rates for the top 3 countries with cases are
USA 7.97 %
Brazil 46.9 %
Russia 3.27%
I am glad I am in Malaysia.
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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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