THE recent spike in Covid-19 cases was due to active screening conducted in prisons and Immigration detention centres across the country, Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said today. 

The director-general of health said this is the reason cases peaked on October 24 and 26. 

The number of new cases hit four digits for the first time on October 24, when Malaysia reported 1,288 new cases in a single day. 

Two days later, the country reported 1,240 new cases.

He also said the conditional movement-control order (CMCO) cannot be considered a failure, as it managed to reduce the R-naught, which measures the infectivity rate of the virus. 

“I do not see this as a failure. If we look at this, from the beginning of the third wave, in more than two weeks, we successfully decreased the infectivity rate from 2.2 to 1,” Noor Hisham said at his daily press conference at the Health Ministry in Putrajaya today. 

Apart from that, the CMCO is also important when it comes to striking a balance between health and the economy.

“The challenge for us is to regulate social movements. We found many had crossed state and district lines,” he said. 

“The concept (of the CMCO) is still the same, where we allow the economic sector to function, but we will have to stringently control the social, education and sports sectors,” he added. 

In addition to that, he said security must also be tightened at national borders, to ensure that illegal immigrants do not enter the country. 

The partial lockdown in Selangor, Putrajaya and Kuala Lumpur was first imposed from October 14 for two weeks, and it has since been extended until Monday. 

Senior Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob announced today that the CMCO will be enforced in all states in the peninsula except Perlis, Pahang and Kelantan from November 9 to December 6.

With the latest move to control the Covid-19 pandemic, the public can no longer travel interstate and inter-district. – November 7, 2020.