IT remains to be seen whether the government will achieve its target to reduce the daily Covid-19 infections to double digits in May, after the movement-control order (MCO), said Najib Razak.

He said active cases and fatalities remain high although there is a decline in the growth of new cases. 

“In fact there were 31 clusters announced in the last two days,” he said in a Facebook post. 

“A month since the half-baked MCO 2.0, which has already been relaxed, Malaysia appears to have outpaced other Asean countries to become the Covid-19 champion of Asean,” he added. 

The outbreak in Malaysia is five times more severe than the Philippines and two-and-a-half times more than Indonesia, when the population size and active cases is taken into account. 

“There is truth to the warning given by health experts to not be fooled by the decline in (new) Covid-19 cases. The decline is attributable to the sudden and drastic reduction in Covid-19 tests,” he said. 

“There was a 50% decrease in capacity from the maximum 76,000 to 32,536, a day before the government announced new cases will be around 3,000 for some time, claiming that the MCO 2.0 was effective.” 

Najib said if the tests conducted are fewer, than the new cases detected will also be fewer.

“In fact, the director-general of health (Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah) announced that the infectivity rate has increased slightly,” he said.

On that note, Najib reminded the public to not be complacent and to comply with the standard operating procedure as the virus is spreading fast within the community. 

Noor Hisham said recently the trend of decline could begin after January 27 in the final two weeks of the MCO.  

“Our expectation is if we enforce the MCO for four weeks followed by CMCO (conditional MCO) we could see cases in double digits by May 11.” – February 13, 2021.