WHILE there has been a triple digit rise in Covid-19 cases recently, Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said the Health Ministry has the capacity to handle the third wave of the pandemic.

The director-general of health told The Malaysian Insight the current occupancy rate of hospital beds from Covid-19 cases is about 40%.

There are 3,446 beds, 878 intensive care unit beds and 1,515 ventilators reserved for Covid-19 cases in states across the country, except Sabah.

For Sabah, 57% of the 110 ICU beds and 71% of the 1,018 hospital beds are occupied as of Tuesday.

The ministry has also allocated 4,161 beds at low-risk quarantine centres, of which 32% is occupied.

Noor Hisham said a total 180 ventilators have also been earmarked for Covid-19 care in the state, adding that there is enough capacity at this juncture.

“On Tuesday, we had the largest discharge ever, which was 350, mainly from Sabah.”

He also said the ministry was not caught off-guard with the cases in Sabah as it was prepared for the hike.

“We started preparing weeks before the Sabah elections,” Noor Hisham said, alluding to the explosion of cases after the polls ended on September 26.

The ministry is also monitoring the situation in the virus hot spots.

“As I said earlier, we are better prepared than we were in March but the third wave is very challenging, as we are dealing with a mutated spike protein virus.”

Sabah registered 429 new cases yesterday, bringing the total number of active cases in the state to more than 3,000.

End community transmission

Meanwhile, epidemiologist Dr Awang Bulgiba Awang Mahmud raised concerns over the health authorities’ ability to cope if the spike in new infections in Sabah shows no signs of abating.

“With more than 3,000 active cases in Sabah now, if the increase in the number of cases does not slow down and more facilities are not made available, they will be completely overwhelmed within a few weeks.

“The only state near to Sabah is Sarawak but Sarawak is too far away for patients to be redistributed there,” he said.

His concern stems from the fact that dedicated Covid-19 beds and ICU beds are rapidly filling up.

He added that simply adding ventilators will not do any good as each ICU bed will require four nurses and a lot of equipment.

“Unless community transmission is slowed down considerably, these will be overwhelmed in a matter of weeks.”

Awang Bulgiba said the real battle is to put a stop to community transmission.

“For Sabah now, more personnel must be sent to help them to stop the community transmission as this will be the key to stopping the outbreak.

“So, nothing less than aggressive contact tracing, testing, quarantine are needed now.”

Awang Bulgiba said there is already widespread community transmission in Sabah, which could have possibly stemmed from neighbouring countries.

This, he said, could have been exacerbated by the poor compliance to the standard operating procedure during the elections last month.

“The genome sequencing done by the Health Ministry on some virus samples indicates this to be the case. Many of these infections were likely to have had mild symptoms or were asymptomatic.

“Some of the patients with mild symptoms probably visited health clinics but were not tagged as possible Covid-19 infections so they were not picked up.”

He also called for a centralised real-time database system for Covid-19.

“I have long advocated for a surveillance system utilising all the ministry’s clinics which have internet access with the data analysed in real-time by CPRC (Crisis Preparedness and Response Centre).

“The database can utilise the e-Covid system which has already been set up.”

He said this system would pick up any unusual pattern in respiratory illnesses in these clinics.

“Targeted testing and isolation can then be done in those localities showing any unusual patterns so that community transmission can be stopped in its early stage.

“It is a bit late to put that system in place for Sabah now but I hope that this will be done for the entire country.” – October 15, 2020.