IN the wake my  November 5 article on the good, the not-so-good and the ugly, a new cluster was announced in Penang. The Intan cluster involved foreign worker and was traced to a 30-year-old female worker who was found to be infected in a routine screening as she was about to depart for home. Kudos to the State Health Department officers who wasted no time carrying out contact tracing. Soon the numbers were racking up; from eight cases on November 5 to 85 cases on November 11 infection spread beyond the apartment blocks in Relau, from which the cluster earned its name, and even to Kedah.

The Intan cluster has proven to be troubling, relegating the previous worrisome Bayan cluster to the backburner. And let’s not forget the Tembaga cluster, though its cases are pretty much under control at just 14 cases so far confined to Penang.

The evolving Permatang cluster will need a separate paragraph later.

As for the Intan cluster, all except for a handful of cases should be the workers at a factory on the south side of the island. Slightly worrying as I have said because cases have cropped up among locals in Daerah Timur Laut Gelugor and Mukim 13 and Daerah Barat Daya Mukim 12 and Mukim J. Contact tracing is vital to ensure infections don’t spread elsewhere.

Speaking of which, all this preoccupation with wanting to know exactly where positive cases are located i.e. where they stay, work, etc is irrelevant. When we receive a notification of a case in condominium X, are we going to avoid infection by avoiding that place? I doubt it. Because we can go to a school and get infected there! Over the weekend, there was news of an outbreak in a private school and a kindergarten in Georgetown.

The bottomline is, the virus is everywhere and can be in anyone simply because not everyone shows symptoms.

As we let the numbers sink in, there is definitely some worry in Penang. There are now 123 cases on the island, only a handful of which are in the remand prison and whose EMCO was lifted the day before yesterday.  Well done, “petugas penjara” and “pegawai kesihatan KKM”, who did their utmost best to contain the outbreak which has counted 512 cases within the prison walls in the heart of Georgetown.

On the mainland, there are 247 cases but close to 90% of these are in the Seberang Perai prison, for which the EMCO will need to be extended for effective containment. As the Alma cluster is on the backburner with no additional cases these past two weeks, attention has turned to the Permatang cluster.

The Permatang cluster has its origins in a private hospital. An index case from Kedah has infected at least eight workers in the hospital. Contact tracing has since yielded 26 cases in Penang, and more in Kedah, Perak and Perlis. The Health Ministry said there is a total 52 cases linked to the cluster.

Finally, there is just one more cluster to consider, the Bayan cluster, in our analysis of the situation in Penang.  It started with the index case detected on October 21, and has since grown to more than 40 cases. The CMCO for the district was greeted with both dismay and joy.  Dismay for local residents who felt their movements were curtailed. Joy for those who wished for the CMCO to curb transmissions, which it did to an extent.

Bayan cluster cases have hit 128 in Penang, Kedah and Perak. Yes, it’s another cross-border outbreak, this time involving factory workers. However, the encouraging thing is that new cases have seen small increases in the last  seven days.  Many of the cases would also have been discharged by now.

#SARSCOV2 is not that lethal if one has no severe underlying medical conditions. Many cases in Penang are asymptomatic and detected through contact tracing. They will heal fast. They will be back home soon.

On our part in Penang, let’s stay vigilant. Never forget to mask when we step out of our homes. The virus doesn’t differentiate between race, creed, wealth or age. Let’s think especially of our family and our loved ones as we seek to #KitaJagaKita. – November 12, 2020.

* Boo Soon Yew reads The Malaysian Insight.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.