The Continued "Mystery" Of Malaysia's Missing Testing Data PLUS...An Open Question To Any Epidemiologists Out There...

Yesterday I mentioned the missing info on testing.  I had wondered whether this was due to the investigation on the procurement of testing kits.  Anyway,  Worldodometer had an updated figure this morning and again it is another mystery.  Based on this morning figure, the average number of daily tests conducted over the past 4 days was 38,100 c/w our daily testing capacity of 26,700.  Surely we cannot be operating at 40% above the daily capacity over the past 4 days.   Let's see what happens over the next few days.

The chart below shows the weekly number of infections in Malaysia since the end Feb 2020.  It demonstrates that there is some plateau over the past 4 weeks and I think this plateau will continue for some time since the bulk of the cases over the past 4 weeks were from the pre-CMCO measures.  With the CMCO, I think at best any “trending” decline will be offset by new cases due to more mobility. 

What is R0?

But I have a question for our epidemiologists.  The weekly number of cases for the past 4 weeks looks about the same each week.  I would interpret this as RO = 1.  If RO was greater than 1, we would have seen an upward trend in cases whereas if RO was significantly less than 1, we would see a declining trend. So how do you reconcile this weekly RO = 1 with the RO values (which is less than 1 and declining over the same 4 week period) as per the MOH model shown below i.e. the dotted blue line in the chart?

Yesterday I mentioned the Tahfiz schools as one of the MOH targeted groups for testing.  Altogether there are supposed to be 370 schools with about 20,000 students and teachers of which 12,300 have been screened. The ominous sign is that MOH is now appealing to those who have returned home to come forward for testing and calling on the schools to provide the relevant info to MOH to enable them to contact the students and staff for testing.  Doesn’t this remind you of what happened in the Sri Petaling event?

Some statistics on the Tahfiz cluster

• Of the 12,300 tested, there were 635 positives of which 85 % were asymptomatic
• Assuming the same ratio for those not tested, there are potential 390 positives many of which would be asymptomatic
• Not all the students have gone home yet.  But I would imagine that there are 1 to 2 hundred potential carriers in various kampungs (I am sure many of the 370 schools are not in the Klang Valley).  I won’t be surprised to see some new EMCO areas among the rural communities at the end of this month if MOH doesn't nip this in the bud.

Our biggest challenge is preventing the spread by asymptomatic cases since the public is unlikely to knowingly have close contact with those known to be sick.  So additional advice based on the Tahfiz school profile is to avoid young children since they are more likely to be asymptomatic.

Secondly based on the Tahfiz school profile, I think we should be OK to have our TT since given our age and health, those OP who were infected would probably have gone into ICU rather than be asymptomatic.

If not done so, you should read the article as per the link

https://www.bostonherald.com/2020/05/12/coronavirus-high-risk-spaces-indoors-with-lots-of-people-warns-umass-professor/

It is about this professor from the University of Massachusetts who had this interesting equation for Covid 19. 

Exposure X Time = Infection

According to him, the 5 most contagious places are the home, office, public transport, social events and restaurants.  He argued that based on contact tracing studies, the highest risk of transmission comes from being enclosed in a crowded place.  So it is comparatively safer to be jogging in the park as the contact with any sick person is for a very short period of time. 

Conclusion?  I guess I will have to let my hair grow longer for some time more.  As per the equation, if our Muslim OP still wants to have a Raya open house, then have it in the garden with no tent and have a timer to prevent guests from staying too long.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Be fearless to get more to Stay Safe, Share this Blog

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. 

Hey, Where Did The Malaysian Test Numbers Data Go ?

When we first went into MCO, I used to get data on the number of tests carried out from the MOH website.  Then sometime in early April, MOH stopped reporting such info so I switched to Worldodometer.  But since 11 May, the number of cum tests for Malaysia as reported by Worldodometer remained unchanged.  I went to a few other sites to check and found that Malaysian data were available only till 11 May.  Does anyone know what is happening?

According to MOH, we now have the capacity for 26,000 tests per day and considering that the number of patients under treatment has reduced significantly (ie thereby reducing the cases required for re-testing), there ought to be a significant increase in the number of new cases being tested daily.

For those who missed the news, MOH has a targeted testing programme that is currently focussed on 8 groups.  The OPs belong to one group.  The targeted groups are

• Tabligh -  38,700 tested so far
• Tahfiz -  12,800 tested so far out of 20,000 students and teachers.
• EMCO areas
• markets - I think the focus is those in Klang Valley
• senior citizens - I am waiting to be tested
• foreign workers - 24,000 tested so far
• healthcare workers - 6,800 testes as at end April
• existing clusters

The other interesting news is that 85 % of the Tahfiz positive cases were asymptomatic.  MOH did not provide that age profile, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is because the majority of the students are young.  I wish MOH would provide more info.  I am sure that it cannot be due to religious beliefs or the school location.

- - - - - - - 

According to Datuk Dr. Amar Singh, a senior consultant pediatrician, we have thousands of mild and/or asymptomatic cases in the country.

However, I estimate that the numbers are in the low hundreds.

We will know who is correct come Raya – a surge to > 100 daily cases means that all my analysis is wrong and I should really stop doing anything further.  OK he is a doctor and I am just an engineer, but let me argue my case.

Star had an article yesterday quoting Datuk Dr. Amar as saying that it was reasonable to assume at least 0.1 % of the population is Covid 19 positive i.e. 32,000 cases many of which are mild or asymptomatic and warned about a spike in cases as we now have more people moving about.

Datuk Dr. Amar had previously estimated the number of infections using the backward-looking mortality method so I presumed that the 32,000 cases are similarly derived. He had said previously that the number of cases in the country is higher than that reported by MOH. I happen to agree that we have higher numbers than those stated by MOH although I don’t think it is as high as 32.000 cases. 

But even if we accept that there are 32,000 cases, we cannot conclude that all of them are still sick.  Over the past 3 months, many would have recovered so if we use the same recovery rate as those reported by MOH, then we should only have about 20% of the 32,000 still sick i.e. about 6,400 cases.

If indeed we have 6,400 mild or asymptomatic cases walking about and assuming R0 = 1 i.e. one person infecting 1 other, then we should be having 6,400 cases over a 2 week period (average duration of sickness) equivalent to 457 daily cases.  Since we don’t have such figures either over the past 2 weeks or even the coming 2 weeks, I think the 32,000 cases must be wrong.  

I will now try to reconcile the potential mild and asymptomatic cases with the actual numbers that were infected. If we assume that all the new clusters and cases (excluding the returnees) since the start of CMCO we caused by contacts with mild or asymptomatic cases, we have

• Total cases since 4 May not due to returnees or old clusters = 393 (Note 1)
• Assume R0 = 1 to 1.6
• Computed mild or asymptomatic cases = 246 to 393 people

OK, while this is a simplistic analysis I think it does provide an order of magnitude of the potential number of mild or asymptomatic cases. 

So over the next 2 weeks we should monitor the number of cases that are not due to contacts with old clusters and/or with those in the EMCO areas.  We can assume that such cases are due to contacts with mild or asymptomatic cases.  We can then work backward to derive the number of mild and/or asymptomatic cases.  I am confident that it would be closer to my estimates than those by Datuk Dr. Amar Singh.

  

- - - - - - -

OP JM posted the link to an Australian article that had a number of charts tracking how Covid 19 is spreading around the world.  When it came to testing, to get around the situation where less testing meant fewer cases detected, it charted the cum number of tests per cum confirmed cases.  An upward slowing line meant good performance. 

I reproduced the chart below where the black and purple lines are for Australia and South Korea respectively.  The bottom 2 lines are for the US and UK. 

I have not seen such an analysis before so I decided to see whether Malaysia is in the Australia/South Korea category or in the US/UK category.  The chart for Malaysia is shown below with numbers about the same as those for South Korea. I am glad that we are in the former group as it means less chance of exponential growth as we enter into the CMCO phase. 

Note 1 : Computation of total cases from new clusters since the start of CMCO

Chow Kit market  =   82

Cheras ma           =   13

Pedas                   = 151

PJ Old Town        =   27

Community           = 120

Total                     =  393

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Be fearless to get more to Stay Safe, Share this Blog

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. 

The Tricky Business Of Estimating A Reliable R0 Reproduction Number

I am not sure how many saw it, but MOH has finally released a chart of its virus model as shown below.  Reading off the chart, we have the following:

• R0 = 3.55 at the start of the MCO
• R0 = 1 if we have about 25 – 30 daily cases
• if we do not follow the SOP, the number of daily cases will be about 150 cases per day by mid-Jul.  The chart shows R0 = 1.6 but this value is flat from the last week of Jun.  I interpret this to mean that the model is projecting another MCO. 

I think that it is safe to assume that R0 = 1 in the model covers the situation where the daily cases are due to sporadic and/or community spread and not from those in quarantine and/or EMCO areas.  Accordingly, there will be about 40 daily sporadic/community spread cases when R0 first hit 1.6.  I think the model gives us a guide on when to start panic buying ahead of the crowd as another MCO is expected.!!

My estimates from community spread (ie total cases excluding returnees, clusters, EMCO) for the past few days are:  (refer to my posting of 8 May for the earlier days) Are we tracking the right things?

Date            Community spread

                    No of daily cases

9 May                3                  

10 May              8                    

11 May              25                   

12 May             13                    

13 May             10                  

The statistics above showed that the average number of daily cases is about half of that for R0 = 1.  Since the period covers the CMCO, it does indicate that we are not likely to see any exponential growth.  

- - - - - 

OP TCF posted some articles about Sweden’s strategy for Covid 19 that was based on voluntary social distancing rather than national lockdown.  The under-reported thing about Sweden was that it managed to keep the virus spread within the capacity of its medical system.  I am sure that if it had exceeded this, it would have declared a national lockdown. 

There are two challenges for any country trying to copy Sweden ie

• Do you have the medical capacity?
• Do you have a population that can voluntarily social distance and observe other public health measures?

While Malaysia has high enough medical capacity, we cannot meet the population requirement.  Just think of how difficult it would have been to stop the Sri Petaling event and think of the millions of foreign workers who are not able to social distance.

I happen to think that we have the right strategy today ie have the CMCO with the ban on public gathering and have the MCO as a contingency.  Then whenever a cluster arises, MOH can act accordingly ie

• for location-based clusters, EMCO those areas which show a virus surge
• for event-based clusters and others, contact tracing and isolating PUI.  

Our shortcomings are the lack of random testing and not making wearing masks mandatory.  If there was a mistake, it was that we should have phased into the CMCO weeks earlier.  

As for the economic impact of the MCO, there are 2 things I don’t quite understand

• Given that exports account for about ¾ of the country’s GDP, wouldn’t we have an economic slowdown even if there was no MCO?  The low oil price, the low palm oil demand, the low demand from importing nations have nothing to do with our MCO. I think the new normal would be 1 to 2 years of hardship.  

• During his 4 May announcement, our PM said that about 45 % of the workforce has gone back to work under the CMCO.  I cannot reconcile the balance 55% as most of those which cannot operate under the CMCO is from the education sector, leisure, hawker type businesses and of course the barbers and saloons. They cannot account for the balance of about 8 to 9 million workforce. 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Be fearless to get more to Stay Safe, Share this Blog

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.

What Do The Latest Low Daily Case Numbers Mean & An Aside On How This Crisis Is Impacting The Stock Market

We had 16 cases yesterday, the lowest for a long time.  But there is some disconnect between the number of daily cases and the number of daily tests reported. In fact, yesterday was not the only day where we reported zero tests as per below.  I won't get excited about the low number of daily cases until we have a few more days of it.

Date         No of daily cases         No of daily tests (a)

8 May               68                             14,083

9 May               54                                0

10 May             67                            11,835

11 May             70                             14,784

12 May             16                               0

a) Source:  Worldodometer

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

For those into the stock market, I came across a presentation by Whitney Tilson who showed that the Chinese stock market reached the bottom when the virus in China peaked.   If you take the view that the stock market is sentiment-driven, then Covid 19 will have a big role in the sentiments of any country.

I wanted to see whether there were the same phenomena for Bursa and thus charted the movement of the KLCI vs several Malaysian Covid 19 metrics as shown below.  I was looking for a forward-looking 
indicator that could tell in real-time that the KLCI has reached the bottom.

Note:  The vertical red line shows the start of MCO.  The scale of the KLCI is on the right while the scale on the left is the respective indicator values

If you look at the bottom left corner chart, it would appear that the % change in infections peaked when KLCI reached the bottom.   If this is reflective of other markets, then we have a forward-looking indicator for some bottom fishing plan.

As per this chart, it would appear that Bursa reached bottom sometime in March and it is too late for those who want to make some quick bucks.  However, if you believe that it is not the end of the story for the virus i.e. there is a possibility of another infection wave in Malaysia, then you have one indicator that could provide a guide on how Bursa will react.

Of course, I could be data mining and you could argue that the KLCI reached the bottom when we went into MCO.  Then instead of charting, just wait for the next MCO to enter into the market!!

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Be fearless to get more to Stay Safe, Share this Blog

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. 

A Week After The Start Of The CMCO And ....Yep, It Looks Like We Are Indeed On A Plateau...

Designed by Freepik

After one week of the CMCO, the figures confirm that we are on a plateau.   I find it hard to see why it would come down in the coming weeks given the many people going back to work. 

Date                   Ave no of daily cases

4 - 10 May                 51

27 Apr - 3 May          74

20 - 26 Apr                56

Don't be misled by the recent news about the foreign workers as they were probably infected prior to the CMCO.  The numbers this week will be a good indicator of what to come in the following few weeks.

I came across an article that said that if we are going to have any realistic plan over the next 12 months, we must understand the virus and the various measures taken to control it.   The challenge for Malaysians is not just trying to understand the virus, but you also have to be a detective in order to unravel the many things being unsaid about what is happening and/or the govt policy responses.

For example, looking at the recent news that the PJ Old Town area has been EMCO, it suggests that the EMCO threshold is > 20 cases within the locality in a short space of time.  About 2.600 residents are affected and all will be screened.  The first batch of 509 people comprising 361 locals and 148 foreigners were screened yesterday, the first day of the EMCO and at this rate it will take about 5 days to cover them all.

Unfortunately, it does not help the residents of a particular area very much to anticipate an EMCO if you listen to the official news as the number of daily cases reported by location is not granular enough.  So you will have to depend on your local community sources and gossip!! 

Secondly, the exponential growth characteristics don’t provide much time for anticipating a lockdown. A good example is the Pedas, Negri chicken plant where the number of cases went from 60 cases on 8 May to 131 cases by 10 May.  The worst part is that the test numbers are only available a few days after testing.

What is the moral of the story? Apart from being a committee member of the local residents’ association, or some direct line with the hardware shop selling barb wires, have 2 weeks of provisions stocked up just in case!!

- - - - - - - - - -  - - - -

I am not sure what to make of 2 news articles yesterday.

• A family member of 7 in Perak who had complied with the MCO for almost 2 months was tested positive when he was about to return to work in Johore.  None of the family members reported sick.  

• Some members of a 20,000 followers Facebook page that was initially established for workers commuting between Johore and Singapore had appealed to the Malaysian PM to be allowed to commute daily to Singapore on grounds that the majority of the cases in Singapore were from migrant workers staying in dormitories and that the community spread cases were less than 10 each day.  They are comparing themselves with the lorry drivers who have been allowed to do such things.

One explanation for the first news is that all the 7 members had mild and/or asymptomatic Covid 19 and it was fortunate that the MCO prevented them from being a walking spreader.

As for the Malaysian commuting to Singapore, if their logic holds there is no reason to have the whole of Singapore under a lockdown.  I suspect that the Singapore authorities do not have any indication of how far the infection has spread from the migrant community to the general population. Singapore does not do mass testing and is probably waiting for the lockdown to serve as a quarantine period for these “untested mild or asymptomatic” cases. 

The moral of both these cases is that there may be many more mild or asymptomatic cases than we know and the general public has yet to understand this picture.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Be fearless to get more to Stay Safe, Share this Blog

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. 

Another 4 Weeks Of CMCO ?! Also...A Few (Further) Thoughts On Foreign Worker Community Testing

The CMCO has been extended by another 4 weeks. I think it will give us time to assess the impact of so many people going back to work, i.e. will we be able to maintain a “steady” number of daily cases or will there be exponential growth.   We are already seeing some impact where the foreign workers now constitute a bigger portion of the number of daily cases.

Date - May	Number of daily cases
	Foreign Workers	Malaysians	Total
7	30	9	39
8	57	11	68
9	45	8	53
10	49	18	37

I think the news so far is about the foreign workers spreading it to their Malaysian co-workers.  Or at least that is the impression from the clusters reported.  I have yet to come across any clusters where the transmission is from foreign workers to Malaysian customers/visitors.  We all should be worried when this happens.

Designed by Freepik

Because of this, there have been many comments about testing foreign workers. There was even one yesterday where the MP of Klang asked for extending the mass testing of foreign workers to low-cost housing residents.  I can only conclude that not many of our politicians understand enough about the virus and/or our capacity to manage it.

• Don’t they understand that we have limited testing capacity – the data shows about 9,000 daily tests for the past week.  At this rate, I have already said it would take 10 months to test all of them.
• Secondly, don’t they understand that the tests have to be repeated.  Just because a person is tested negative one day does not mean that he cannot get infected the next day. 

So with limited capacity and repeated testing required, there is no way we can test all foreign workers. But all is not lost.  The answer – random testing.  This random testing or sampling technique has been successfully employed for quality control in many factories and by market research companies.  It is not some secret technique. 

MOH is already doing targeted testing.  I think the target is chosen based on the clusters detected.  But this is reactive.  We need to complement this with random testing so that we can identify potential new clusters.  

How can we gauge whether MOH testing of foreign workers is effective?

• MOH used the detection rate (no of positives divided by no tested) as an indicator of whether there is sufficient testing.  WHO has 10% as the standard.  Based on the statistics we have a 4.7 % detection rate for the foreign workers c/w 2.4 % for just the Malaysians.  So we are doing better than what WHO has set for even the foreign workers
• If you look at the % of the respective population being tested, depending on what is your view of the foreign workers' population, we probably are testing a higher % of foreign workers c/w Malaysian
• In terms of number of tests per million population, both the testing of foreign workers and Malaysians places us somewhere in the top 1/3 ranking (if all the countries tracked by Worldodometer are ranked by number of tests per million population)

Items	Foreign workers	Malaysian
Number tested	24,125	232,812 (a)
Total population	2 – 4 m	31.5 m
% of pop tested	0.6 % – 1.2 %	0.7 %
Number of positives	1,132	5,523
Positives % of tested	4.7 %	2.4 %
Number tested past 4 days (b)	1,786	33,001

Notes

a) Assumed that the total tested are just for Malaysians and foreign workers ie assume that there are no international travelers tested

b) Between 6 May and 10 May

  

So I would conclude that we are doing OK in terms of testing the foreign workers.  The only negative news is that the ratio of foreign workers being tested to Malaysians over the past 4 days is half of that over the past 4 months.  I interpret this to mean that more foreigners were tested during the MCO period c/w the past 4 days.  This should not be surprising since there were many EMCO areas (One City, Selangor Mansion, etc) that were mainly residences of foreign workers.

If we take the detection rate as the gold standard, it means that we will have to double the numbers of foreign workers to be tested c/w Malaysians.  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, 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 employers' plan together with the targeted testing of MOH would enable us to double the testing of foreign workers. 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Be fearless to get more to Stay Safe, Share this Blog

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. 

The "New Normal" For Some Time To Come & A Few Options For Managing Foreign Worker Infection Clusters

The chart below shows the weekly number of cases for Malaysia and you will notice the “steady” cases for the past 3 weeks.  I think it will represent the new normal for many weeks to come.  

During the MCO we had a large number of cases from returnees and local clusters.  Today the returnees are being replaced by foreign workers. 

But the significant difference is that previously the news on the foreign workers was related to EMCO ie the infection was transmitted within their residential areas.  Currently, the news is about infections in their workplaces. 

• The Pedas factory in Negri has 81 foreigners and 7 locals.  
• We have the Cheras mall with 1 local and 9 foreigners
• I think it is not the end of the story for the Wholesale market with 189 cases currently
• There is the Pavilion construction cluster with 20 odd foreign workers
• OP CES mentioned about the foreign construction workers in his township

During the MCO there is less worry about locals being infected by the foreign workers.  Now with many back working, there is a good chance of them infecting their Malaysian co-workers and/or the Malaysian customers.  New normal = new source of risk.

I hate to make the analogy with Singapore, but today about 90% of the cases in Singapore are due to the foreign workers.  Imagine the economy being shut down due to foreign workers. President Trump will have a fit.  The worst part is that Singapore still has some time to go if it wants to test all of them as I think only about 25% of the foreign workers have been tested so far.

Malaysia will also be facing foreign workers' risk as we all go back to work.  Given our limited testing capacity, the best option is

• Random tests to identify potential clusters, maybe with a combination of testing in residential areas and in companies with large numbers of foreign workers. NOT HAPPENING 
• Have the EMCO whenever a cluster is detected so that in one swoop we can gather all the contacts/PUI for testing and/or quarantine.  The lessons from the Sri Petaling event is that if we use the appeal method to trace contacts, we will have another exponential growth. 
• Make wearing a mask mandatory.  NOT HAPPENING

Unfortunately, I think only the 2nd point is being adopted.  The good news on testing was that the cluster in CES township was found when the foreign workers were sent to a private clinic for testing.  If all employers do some random testing on their own, they could help identify clusters before it gets into exponential growth.  As for wearing masks, I am confused about the govt position.

I know why wearing masks in public places has not been made mandatory – because if all wear masks you cannot differentiate between the robbers and the police. 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Be fearless to get more to Stay Safe, Share this Blog

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.