SELANGOR task force for Covid-19 chairman Dr Dzulkefly Ahmad today urged Putrajaya to think carefully about ordering a full lockdown to rein in the coronavirus in the state.

“Don’t take a lockdown as the easy way out because of your failure to handle the Covid-19 pandemic,” he said in a Covid-19 press conference today.

He said even though Selangor has consistently logged the most daily infections among the states, the Covid infectivity rate (R0) in the state is still lower than others.

“Compared to Kedah, Pahang and Terengganu which have registered an infectivity rate of more than 1.20, Selangor’s infectivity rate currently stands at 1.16.

“In terms of the total number of deaths, Selangor is number four in the country. If we’re (thinking of enforcing) a full lockdown based on numbers, we hope the government will consider (these figures),” he said.

The national infectivity rate is 1.08. Yesterday Malaysian reported 4,446 new cases with Selangor contributing 1,650 of them.

State Public Health, Unity, Women and Family Development committee chairman Dr Siti Mariah Mahmud urged the federal government to consider a targeted lockdown with an enhanced movement control order (EMCO) instead to contain the virus spread.

“We can implement EMCO in areas that have clusters, but we need to have other instruments such as mass testing and vaccines. Otherwise (the outbreak) will begin again when the EMCO ends.

“The mistake we made during the first lockdown in March last year was that never properly educated the people,” she said.

Siti Mariah and Dzulkefly agreed a full lockdown would be to the detriment to the people of Selangor, especially the daily wage workers.

They also advised federal authorities to  review its testing methodologies to expedite contact tracing and isolation of patients. 

Dzulkefly said the federal government’s poor diagnostics tools and delays in contact tracing and testing had created a backlog which had led to community transmissions.

“Selangor’s role is complementary. We cannot go against policies set by the Ministry of Health (MOH) . But although we have given our suggestions to the MOH, they have not been accepted,” said Siti Mariah.

She said it was hard to get data from the MOH which was chary of sharing information for fear of infringing on personal data protection laws.

Mass testing

In an effort to halt infections, Selangor has launched mass testing through Selcare, the administrator of the state’s healthcare programme since the start of the pandemic last year.

Selcare manager Mohd Noor Md Nasir told The Malaysian Insight, Selcare processed an average 2,000 Covid-19 tests daily.

“From January 2021 to May 17, we did 18,450 tests on the Selangor Covid-19 mass screening programme using the RTK antigen.

“An average 80 cases are detected daily,” he said.

The programme offers free tests to all residents of Selangor.  Test results are available the same day.

“For now, we are doing a tour of all 56 constituencies in Selangor; we started May 8 to June 10.

“RM9,000,000 has been allocated to the screening programme since last year.” – May 19, 2021.