PETALING JAYA: Former deputy health minister Dr Lee Boon Chye has called for an immediate boost in the number of daily vaccinations against Covid-19, saying it is no longer tenable to rely on contact tracing.
“Contact tracing has collapsed” because health workers could no longer keep up with the high infection rate, he said.
Lee told FMT he was confident of seeing an appreciable drop in the infection rate if vaccination efforts were ramped up so that the daily number of people receiving their doses would increase from the current 400,000 to 500,000.
He said cases would likely come down once 30% to 40% of the population had received their two doses.
He also said mass testing would take a long time as more people were being infected.
By last Monday, 11.7 million Malaysians – or 36.6% of the population – had been vaccinated. Out of these, 3.6 million had received two doses.
Michael Kang, president of the SME Association of Malaysia, told FMT he believed the infection rate would have been under better control if the government had heeded a call he made last year to immediately carry out contact tracing and to isolate new cases.
He said the government should, “from the start”, have used technology to track new cases and prevented infected persons from moving around.
“But they have been locking down the country and businesses are dying,” he said.
Malaysia has undergone three nationwide lockdowns, with the third starting last June 1.
“Most businesses have no choice but to close because of the lockdowns,” Kang said.
“The fact is that lockdowns are ineffective as long as those infected are still roaming freely.”
Kang’s association has begun working with Putrajaya to vaccinate people in the SME sector.
“We are hoping to vaccinate SME workers and frontliners as soon as possible so that businesses can operate,” he said.
A week ago, entrepreneur development and cooperatives minister Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar warned that 49% of micro- small- and medium-sized enterprises could soon collapse if the current lockdown was prolonged.
Source: https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/nation/2021/07/14/govt-urged-to-ramp-up-daily-jabs-to-half-a-million/