A MEETING tomorrow morning will decide whether to “loosen“ the movement-control order or further extend it, said Director-General of Health Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah.

He said the meeting will be attended by officials from the Health Ministry, Home Ministry and National Security Council.

A top agenda of the meeting is the status of the MCO which is set to expire on April 14.

“Today, we will go over the statistics and the modelling to ensure that we have got a clear picture of what has been happening over the last week or two, and we are to advise the prime minister and the cabinet on the appropriate actions to be taken,” said Noor Hisham.

“So far the data shows that we are still in a struggle. We haven’t won and we haven’t yet lost.

“What we are doing now is strengthening our healthcare services at the hospitals such as the wards and intensive care units,” he said in a daily press briefing in Putrajaya.

Noor Hisham said JP Morgan, the World Health Organisation and the Malaysian Institute of Economic Research had projected an exponential rise in cases next week.  

He said the Health Ministry hopes to prevent that via “targeted action” on Covid-19 hotspots.

“Instead of using data covering a state, now we have the records of the districts and mukim (townships).

“We want to focus on hotspot areas rather than putting (our focus) on an entire (district) with 80,000 people.”

Noor Hisham pointed to the lockdowns at the Menara City One condominium in Kuala Lumpur, the Selangor Mansion and Malaya Mansion.

“We zoom into the condo rather than the whole area, this is our innovative approach for a targeted action to be done in that area. So we can focus our limited resources to look into that area rather than an entire zone. This is the reason why we are looking into the data.”

He added that the government may need to change the way it looks at and presents data regarding Covid-19 infections, particularly on how red zones are determined.

“We are using cumulative figures. Going that way, everything will be a red zone eventually. We are looking at using the latest two-week period for a more accurate picture of whether it is a green or red or orange zone.”

The Health Ministry is also working with the police and the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) “to look at technology to identify people”, Noor Hisham said without elaborating further. – April 9, 2020.