Thread by @boosulyn

38 people have died from Covid in Malaysia in the first 6 days of 2021, including 3 brought-in-dead cases (2 in Selangor, 1 in Sabah).

We do not know their names or the families they left behind. In stark contrast to other countries, Malaysia doesn't humanise our epidemic.

Malaysia's Covid management system is broken. There are anecdotal reports of delays in test results, delays in picking up positive cases, delays in tracing contacts of positive cases, all of which allows rapid spread of the virus, burdening the system and creating a vicious cycle

MOH must be transparent and reveal the range of period for producing Covid test results, tracing close contacts, and picking up positive cases to send to hospital, broken down by state or even district, so that we know where exactly the problem lies. And we can try to fix it.

Now that Malaysia is in Covid mitigation phase (we have been for months now), our focus should be on preventing death. So, hospital beds must be reserved for the sick. All asymptomatic and mild cases must be put on home quarantine. MOH should reveal daily the bed occupancy rates.

The indicators we should be looking at now is bed and ventilator usage, and fatalities. Positive cases on home quarantine must be given explicit guidelines on what to do, how to call for help if symptoms worsen, and MOH must ensure rapid resources for these ppl who call for help.

A full-blown MCO will not help now. Lockdowns do not destroy the virus; they only freeze it in place. A lockdown is only meant to build capacity to prepare for a surge of cases. I do not think Malaysia can build a new hospital in a month, much less 10 days like Wuhan dulu.

With the focus on preventing death, MOH must reveal much more data on Covid fatalities -- time from admission to death, location of victims, when were they tested, when were their test results out, when were they admitted to hospital etc.

We made a lot of mistakes in our Covid public health response in 2020. If the govt doesn't want to admit failure, fine, don't. But authorities must completely change the way they manage Covid and report data transparently this year onwards. They are responsible for any lives lost

Covid vaccines will not immediately halt the epidemic. And the Covid vaccination program, likely the biggest in Malaysian history, will come with a whole set of planning and implementation problems, as we've seen even in Western countries.

Getting the vaccines is one thing. Administering shots to the arm is another. Malaysia is unlikely to achieve even one-third population coverage with Covid vaccines in 2021, because this means jabbing over 1 million people each month in 10 months from Mar-Dec.

We're lucky if we can jab 100,000 people a month. The govt must be transparent with the vaccination campaign data and reveal the immunisation targets for various districts/ hospitals/ clinics, and weekly progress against targets for individual facilities.

In short, Malaysia is in for another tough year in 2021. The govt must completely overhaul its Covid public health response and, more importantly, be transparent in reporting. Without transparency, people are left helpless. The govt CANNOT manage the epidemic on its own.