Everyone at home has been applauding the efforts of Dr. Noor Hisham, our Health Director- General who has been working tirelessly to curb the spread of Covid-19. In addition to that, most of us have also spent quite a lot of days at home and our efforts are starting to wield results.
According to The Star, almost 4,000 Covid-19 patients have been discharged from our hospitals! Dr. Noor Hisham then says that this is due to the early phases of MCO.
“We are now in a recovery phase. We have been able to flatten the curve and have prevented the exponential surge of cases.”
We are now on the last day of the third phase and by tomorrow we will be entering the fourth phase. Dr. Noor Hisham mentioned that our 43 laboratories nation-wide have a combined testing capability of 16,635 samples per day.
In addition to that, the Institute for Medical Research and the Kota Kinabalu Public Health Laboratory in Sabah will be using the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI)’s automated testing device which could test up to 6,000 samples daily.
“Capacity-wise, that’s good. We were told that the city of Guangdong in China, which has a population of 110 million people, conducts 30,000 tests a day. We are on our way to conducting 22,000 tests in a day.”
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has put out a benchmark stating that out of all the Covid-19 tests that have been done, only 10% of them should be positive. Dr. Noor Hisham says that for Malaysia, it’s only 4% which is great.
“This shows our targeted approach in Covid-19 testing, where we aim for high-risk localities, is showing results.”
Well, this is definitely brilliant news to hear! We should all continue to stay at home during the rest of this MCO so that we can get this over with quickly!
Also read: Health DG: Hospitals Are Now Using Less Than 30% Of Their Capacity On Covid-19 Patients
