Saturday, 13 June 2020

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. 

Weekly Covid cases mid Jun

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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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. 

Friday, 12 June 2020

Klang Valley has a disproportionately higher number of Covid 19 cases per mill population. WHY?

There is something about the distribution of Covid 19 cases in the country that I don’t understand. 

If you plot the Covid 19 case rate for each state ie take the number of cases for each state divided by the population of the state, we have the picture as shown in the chart (ie no of cases per million population)


Covid cases by State, Malaysia

 
You will see that 3 states stand out – KL, Putrajaya and Negri.   OK, we must remember that the number of cases included returnees so the number of cases for some states may be skewed eg
  • Selangor has 105 returnees
  • Negri has 169 returnees
So I overlaid another plot after excluding the returnees.  Except for Putrajaya, the picture is still the same.
 
I expected the rates to be the same for all the states but the chart shows that for 3 areas it is higher than the national average rate of 241 cases per million

What it means is that if you are in KL, you are about 6 times more likely to find Covid cases c/w the national average.  Indirectly it means a higher risk of infection.   By the same logic, if you are in Negri you are more likely to be infected than if you are in Kedah.
 
So why do KL and Negri stand out?   My first thought was this was the Klang Valley and as Selangor has the next largest rate just before Negri in the chart, the Klang Valley story seems plausible. 
 
To try to figure out the reason, I plotted a scattergram of case rate vs population for all the states and you can see that KL, Selangor, and Negri stand out as outliers.

Covid rate vs Population Malaysia

Can anyone think of an explanation for this pattern? 

At first, I thought that we have a scenario where if you are in a more densely populated area, it meant higher chances of contacts, etc so that you have an extraordinary higher number of cases.

By this logic, it meant that the US with 10 times the population of Malaysia will have significantly more cases than Malaysia ie it will be much higher number of cases than that suggested by the population ratio.   This is actually the situation as the US has 250 times more cases than Malaysia
  • USA has 2 million cases
  • Malaysia has 8,000 odd cases
Of course, I am just confusing you with statistics. The reason for the higher number of cases in the US is more than just having a bigger population. 

To come back to the chart.  

For the scenario where a higher population leads to a higher infection rate to be proven, the dots in the scattergram should show a trend from the bottom left-hand corner towards the top right-hand corner of the chart.  

But there is no such pattern.  As can be seen from the chart, if you exclude KL and Negri, the case rate is quite independent of the population in each state. 
 
Then I thought that maybe the different land sizes for each state could account for the outliers. So I did a different scattergram as per below that shows the number of cases by the land area of each state. 

Covid cases vs land size Malaysia
 
Again there is no pattern because if the number of cases varies with land size eg more cases if the population is in smaller areas, we would have seen a trend from the top left-hand corner to the bottom right-hand corner of the scattergram. 

If there was this pattern, it would have meant that the rate of infection is related to the population density.  But no such relationship.

Rather, I would say that excluding KL and Selangor, the no of cases does not seem to vary with the land size of each state. 

So it is not land size, it is not a larger population.  What is so special about the Klang Valley that is causing all the extraordinary number of cases?

I know.  It is where most of the politicians are.  

As Sherlock Holmes said when you have eliminated all the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbably, must be the truth.

But seriously, can anyone explain this finding? 


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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. 


Thursday, 11 June 2020

Who will trust WHO after the asymptomatic fiasco?

I learned yesterday that WHO also may not have much clue about what they are talking about.  There was a statement by one of the senior doctors that there are not many virus transmission by asymptomatic cases.

You can imagine the uproar.  Eventually WHO had to resort to saying it is a personal comment,  that it was not interpreted correctly, etc

Who will trust WHO after this as an authoritative source of Covid 19 information? 


Asymptomatic
Designed by Freepik

I have now learned that there are many shades of “asymptomatic”
  • Pre-symptomatic – those who have yet to show symptoms but will eventually be sick with symptoms
  • Mildly sick – those who are sick but don’t have obvious symptoms
  • Asymptomatic – those who are sick without any symptoms
You realize that it all doesn’t really matter to the public as you will likely be infected if you have close contact with anyone of them.

I think there have been many Malaysians who have fallen sick by being in contact with such cases.  

Remember that all those who tested positive are isolated.  MOH doesn’t care whether you are mildly sick, or show no symptoms – their standard is the testing result.

Given the above, it means that the general public falling sick and who have not come into contact with known clusters are catching it from the various “shades of asymptomatic” cases who have not been tested and are walking around. 

What to do?  It is actually down to MOH 

Given its current “excess” testing capacity, MOH should change its testing protocol to have a wider random testing programme so that it can catch such cases.

It will probably be less cost-effective than the current targeted testing, but why let the capacity go to waste.  Especially considering that it also cost the country to treat the sick; and think of the social-economic cost of having continuous daily cases.

But I would suggest that the random test can be narrowed.

When market research companies do a survey, they don’t simply contact people randomly.  They actually try to establish a profile of the population to be studied eg by age, by sex, and then devise a random survey programme where the number of people surveyed bears some relationship to the numbers in each population segment.  It reduced that numbers to be surveyed yet provide some statistical accuracy. 

As we already know the risk groups, it should not be too difficult for MOH to adopt this idea. 
  • Foreign workers living in their own quarters can be one segment
  • We can leave out the domestic maids
  • Those working in enforcement can be another segment
  • etc
My point is that the testing strategy should change with the changing environment.


Kawasaki

Designed by Freepik  OK, I am being facetious

I also learned a bit more about Covid 19 risks to children.

First, there is the Kawasaki disease. This is a rare syndrome that affects young children and which damages the coronary artery so that as the child grows the artery doesn’t grow with them reducing the amount of blood supply to the heart.
Then there is the other PIMS (pediatric inflammatory multi-system syndrome). I understand that the Kawasaki disease is a sub-set of this and the other PIMS differs from Kawasaki in that they don't have the heart problem. 

OK, I know that there is still more research to link these sicknesses to Covid 19.

But it does raise concern as we are opening up kindergartens and schools.

My grandkids are in Singapore and they just went back to school on Mon.  They wear face shields as one of the SOP.   Before the lockdown, the school was already taking the temperature daily of everyone who walks into the school compound. 

Now they have this mask and the children are seated apart – social distancing.

You and I know that children are most likely to misbehave.  So I don't know how long the novelty of wearing masks and face shields with last before they take them off when the teacher is not looking.  We all know that teachers cannot have their eyes on the kids 100% of the time.

The only good (?) thing about this kids' problem is that it is very rare and given that only a small % of children get Covid 19, it is even rarer.  

I came across an article citing a French report that fewer than 2 out of 100,000 children would be expected to have PIMS.  There is another article saying that PIMS appears most common in children of African descent and this could be related to social or living conditions or genetic vulnerability. 


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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. 



Wednesday, 10 June 2020

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.  

Daily cases excl detainee

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.


Mystery
Designed by Freepik
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.
 
Malaysia cum covid tests
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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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. 

Tuesday, 9 June 2020

What's our fascination with alphabets in the Covid 19 war?

alphabets
Designed by Freepik

Come tomorrow, we will have another phase of the MCO – the Recovery MCO, or as our PM called it the RMCO.  This is to last till 31 Aug.  And then we are supposed to see how well we comply with all the SOP before deciding what to do next.  

The impression is that it will be over soon. 

However, I think that it will take about another 2 years before we see the end of the tunnel. 

What is my basis? 

Think about it.  Over the past 3 months, we have the MCO,  the EMCO,  then the CMCO, and now the RMCO.  So over the 3 months period, we have used up1 alphabet every month ie “E”, “C” and “R”

There are still 23 alphabets left so at 1 alphabet a month, we still have about 2 years to go.

Actually, I missed one out.  We also have SEMCO for a semi-enhanced MCO that was used in Pudu last month.  

You think I am being funny. HaHa.   Actually, I found out about this govt propensity to use alphabets and numbers whenever COVID is involved

  • Our PM mentioned the 6 R steps in his speech.  When I saw him speaking I was amused cos the 6 R refer to English words yet he was speaking in Bahasa.  I think this has to do with the fascination of numbers and alphabet
  • MOH has talked about avoiding the 3 C – Crowded place, Confined spaces and  Close conversation.  The Bahasa version is 3 S – Sesak, Sempit (it is elakan kawasan yang sesak, sempit), Sembang dekat 
  • There is also the MOH video I saw on Youtube that talks about “amalkan 3 W” –  Wash, Wear (mask), and Warn.    I kid you not!

You still don’t believe me about the link between COVID 19 and the alphabet?.  Let me give you other examples of how alphabets have been linked to COVID 19. 

  • 5 G – Remember the conspiracy theory about the virus being caused by 3G mobile phone technology
  • 3 M – OK I am being funny.  But 3 M actually make face-mask
  • 3 D – this is the 3D printer being used to make face-mask during the shortage
  • Remember the 3 strains of COVID virus A, B and C?
If you don't believe what I have said above, just wait till next month.  I am sure that the govt will come out with another tagline involving a number and an alphabet!

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If I was paranoid, I would think that the govt is spying on me cos I saw this news yesterday about the govt giving RM 50 to those who downloaded the MySejahera app.  They had problems as it led to the server crashing after receiving 700,000 applications in one minute.

Why do I have the conspiracy theory about being spied on?

Long before I started this COVID blog, I was commenting on COVID with my old school friends thru the Yahoo group.  I started in Mac and some time in 5 April, I made the tongue-in-cheek comment that the govt can easily get people to download any contact tracing app by giving away money for downloading.  

So now this is being done.  OK, I was more generous than the govt as I was thinking of RM 1,000. 

I have posted below what I wrote on 5th April for your reading as I think it is still relevant.

BTW as you read it, remember that I proposed the phased ending on 5th April and this has also come to pass. 

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History
Designed by Freepik



5th April 2020




We had 150 deaths yesterday.  The updated S curve equation remains unchanged and projects 40 cases per day come 10th April.  FYI, the 40 cases are the point where a district is classified as a red zone.    

MOH said that they will make a decision on the MCO on 10th April by looking at the data.   Dr. Fauci of the USA said that he will know that the USA has passed the peak when they have 14 days of declining cases.  Malaysia doesn't have enough time left to use this criterion.  As it is unlikely that we will have zero cases come 10th  April, I do hope that MOH has some better model than merely curve projection. 

Yesterday Singapore announced its lockdown plan after being held up for weeks as a good example of a place where containment (testing, contract tracing, isolation) can work without resorting to shutting down the economy.   The main reason for the change of mind is that they have run out of resources to manage the containment strategy.  If an efficient nation like Singapore has problems with such a containment strategy, I have very little confidence that we can do an effective containment strategy for Malaysia.

Dr. Fauci made a very interesting comment when asked about what should the USA do after they have flattened the curve and brought the spread under control. He said that they should see a "re-set" implying that the virus is not going to disappear and all the social distancing and other containment measures should continue after the lock down stage.  

Given the situation of Singapore and Dr Fauci comment, I think we have to live with a scenario where we have periods of containment (i.e. no lock down to enable the economy to function) with periodic bouts of MCO.  The MCO goal is no longer just for flattening the curve to meet the hospitalization capacity, but also to meet the containment capacity.

No country can live with a shutdown for a long period of time.  So I don't think we should extend the MCO come mid-April.   One strategy for the govt is to do a phased ending of the MCO.  I think this is possible cos looking at the data, a significant number of infections have come from only a few red zones.   Today we have 17 districts classified as red zones.  Together these red zones accounted for 2/3 of the cum no of cases in the country.  The growth rates of COVID 19 for these 17 districts from 21st Mac to 3rd April is about doubled that for the rest of the non-red zone regions. 

Regions                                    Compounded daily growth rate
All Red zone                                           10.0 %
Country excl red zone                              5.7 %

In reality, the critical virus areas are not whole districts.  If I interpret the news correctly, the enhanced MCO is applied to specific residential areas within these red zoned districts.  I think that MOH seems to have done a good job of identifying the red zones and getting the people there tested.  It may be a bit beyond them to have to handle the testing, contact tracing, and isolation for the whole country.  So a phased ending of the MCO would not tax both our medical and containment resources. 

The red zone data above offers a rationale for a phased ending of the MCO that could operate as follows: 
a) Maintain the MCO for the red zones and only end the MCO for them when the daily case goes to zero.   Then end the MCO for the rest of the country

b) Open up interstate traveling state by state so that the police/army could do temperature checks for all vehicles crossing state lines.  

c) school and education centres opening should lag the end of the MCO by two weeks. 

It goes without saying any ending of the MCO must be dependent on having a stronger containment capability. 

i) testing: We are still testing at a pathetic rate of about 2,000 per day in the first week of April c/w to the target of 16,500.   We should have more privatized testing.  Germany had its first COVID 19 at the end of Jan.  By then Malaysia already had 8 cases.  Today Germany has done some 440,000 tests compared to our 50,000.    

ii) social distancing
- make it mandatory to wear facemask when not at home.  We have to work on the basis that everyone is a carrier and the face mask is to prevent us from infecting others
- require all premises to have temperature checks and social distancing measures.  There is hope for the country cos I have been going out to buy takeaways from the stall in the coffee shops.  The stall asks the customers to wait outside the shop after taking the order and when the food is ready, they place the food on a table outside for collection.  I am amazed.

iii) contact tracing:  We should rope in the private detective agencies and security companies to help.  Ideally, we should have the contact tracing app for everyone. I am sure that if the govt gives a RM 1000 gift for everyone who has this app, we will have full compliance.   
- Also require all public gathering (if not banned) to compile contacts of all participants. 

iv) isolation: I am not sure whether the 19,000 beds set up for the mandatory quarantine is sufficient as this equates to an admission rate of about 1,400 per day.  If we have the contact tracing app with stiff penalties, we can have the home quarantine as an alternative 
 

So if any of you can get thru to MOH, float the idea of a phased ending.  


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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. 


Sunday, 7 June 2020

Malaysia will never eliminate the virus


In theory, it is possible to eliminate the virus since it is not a “living thing” and once there is no “host” to pass the virus, it will be eliminated.

But Malaysia missed the chance of doing it and now it is too late politically and economically to try. 

Have other countries succeeded? 

I came across two articles about how the virus has been “eliminated” in Wuhan and New Zealand

The first was about how the Wuhan city govt tested all its 9.9 million residents (costing RM 540 m to be shouldered by the Wuhan govt) over a 10 day period and found no confirmed Covid 19 cases. 

  • However, it found 300 asymptomatic cases that they have isolated.  I am actually confused as I would have thought that asymptomatic meant you also had the virus.  
  • Can you imagine testing 1 million people per day c/w our 10,000 per day? 
The second was about New Zealand.  As of yesterday, they had zero Covid 19 cases in the country for 15 days.  The last one detected was on 22 May. 

On the face of it, both these places seemed to have eliminated the virus.  In my lingo, there will not be any “spontaneous” cases.  

Having confirmed that it is possible to get zero cases, I wanted to see what happened to the few countries that have been praised for their efforts in controlling the virus – Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam.  

Sad to say, the virus is still present in these countries as can be seen from the graphs showing the number of daily cases from 1 May.

I had to separate the charts for Vietnam & Taiwan from Korea & Malaysia as the former cases are so low comparatively that they would not come out in the same charts

vietnam and taiwan covid
Vietnam and Taiwan do not seem to have a continuous 14 days of zero cases.  They have zero for a few days and then one or two cases re-appear meaning that the virus is still in the country







korea and malaysia covid

Korea has averaged 40 cases daily for the past week.  Malaysia is quite similar if you ignore the black swan 277 cases spike.  So fat hopes to both of these countries when it comes to eliminating the virus. 
 





I am still trying to understand what New Zealand did that was so different from Malaysia.  
  • NZ went into lockdown when they had 102 cases.   No big deal as Malaysia went into MCO when we had 117 cases
  • NZ lockdown involved the closure of schools and all non-essential workplaces, a ban on social gathering, and severe travel restrictions.   It sounded very much like what we experienced during the MCO. 
Yet today NZ is close to declaring that they have eliminated the virus while Malaysia is still coping with 19 to 277 daily cases over the past 7 days.

I think NZ was very lucky.

Malaysia was unfortunate that although we had 117 cases at the start of MCO like NZ, we had this 16,000 people who attended the Sri Petaling event that gave us plenty of headache in terms of contact tracing

I don’t have the numbers of people NZ had to trace.  They said that the lockdown gave them time to trace contacts.  I would imagine that NZ did not have the 16,000 to start with. 

The worst part is that Malaysia not only had to trace the 16,000 people but also their contacts.  Imagine the scale of the work.  A month later, we had tested 26,000 odd associated with Sri Petaling.  That is not all.   The total people associated with Sri Petaling that was tested was 46,000 by the end of May.

It is the sheer numbers that NZ never had to contend with.

These large numbers in Malaysia meant more asymptomatic cases i.e possibly more sick people were not detected during the MCO phases and these became the seeds for the many "spontaneous cases" we experienced currently.   

Today with the relaxation, I would think it is impossible to eliminate the virus unless we have another MCO.

But the second MCO will not happen given the economic cost.  Besides we have gotten used to living with a situation where the virus numbers seem manageable in terms of our treatment capacity as well as our contact tracing capacity.  So it would be politically difficult to justify another MCO just to eliminate the virus. 

I will go so far to say that if after lifting the lockdown New Zealand gets a few cases (maybe due to imports), I am sure that they will also not go through another lockdown just to eliminate the virus again.  


Conclusion – We were unlucky and having missed the boat in eliminating the virus, it is not politically and economically acceptable to the rakyat to go through another MCO just to try to eliminate the virus.  So we just have to live with it. 


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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. 

New record

We are entering new records for the number of weekly cases both nationally and for the central region. If you think of exponential grow...