MANY Covid-19 patients have broken the law by not reporting their self-test results on the MySejahtera application, Khairy Jamaluddin said.

The health minister said these patients were either ignorant or have blatantly broken the law.

“By law, if one is infected by Covid-19, they must report it to get the home surveillance order (HSO) so that they can quarantine at home,” Khairy told reporters today at the opening ceremony of the National Institutes of Health’s complex in Setia Alam, Shah Alam, Selangor.

“This is the law, but there are those who test positive but still decide to leave the house.

“So we are just asking people to continue reporting their test results in MySejahtera.”

He said reporting the test results will enable the ministry to know the real Covid-19 situation in the country.

Khairy said even he himself uploads his weekly test results on the app.

He said failure to report self-test results is also one of the reasons for the under-reporting of daily cases.

“Our protocol for the test has already been relaxed.

“We used to do PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests. Now, we see that most of the tests reported are from RTK tests and there are those who do self-test and not report the results at all,” he said.

He, however, said the ministry switched its attention to the severity of Covid-19 cases, compared to the number of daily cases, when they decided to transition to endemicity.

“So with this situation, we take the proxy indicator. We don’t really look at the number of cases. We look at the seriousness of the cases,” he said.

“When we made the decision to switch to the endemic phase, we had to look at the severity of cases like deaths, admissions to hospitals.

“As long as admissions to hospitals, most importantly the intensive care unit usage and deaths are at a low level, then the situation is under control.”

Malaysia reported an increase in new Covid-19 cases last week at 28,554, from 28,339 the week before.

Health director-general Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah, in his weekly report, said there were no changes in the number of patients admitted to hospitals and low-risk quarantine centres.

Meanwhile, when asked about a possible new Covid-19 wave caused by the highly infectious Omicron BA.5 variant, Khairy said Malaysia is currently going through a “new-low-long” wave.

Comparing the current situation with other countries, he said Malaysia is not reporting a staggering number of daily cases but a steady number of new infections for a longer period of time.

“In certain countries like Singapore, their Omicron BA.5 is a big wave,” he said.

“But for us in Malaysia, our waves are small but long. For example, we are reporting daily cases of around 2,000-5,000, but we are reporting such cases for a long duration.

“It doesn’t rise suddenly. The cases go up a little and stay at that level.

“So this is a new ‘new-low-long’ wave that we are going through.”

Last month, Khairy said the ministry had detected five BA.5 subvariant cases through genomic sequencing as of June 30 and that it was likely to cause an increase in Covid-19 cases. – August 9, 2022.