THE majority of Covid-19 infections are sporadic and not from factories, said the Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers (FMM), refuting widespread perception factories were the main contributors to the workplace clusters. 

Its president Soh Thian Lai said that data from the Health Ministry showed that 69% – 398,846 out of 578,105 – of Covid-19 cases recorded this year were detected in the community and are not linked to any clusters. 

“Data released by the ministry on June 21 showed that until June 19, more than 300,000 cases from the total of 578,105 were detected in community (sporadic) and cannot be associated with any existing clusters while the balance of 31% came from clusters. 

“FMM is deeply concerned with the repeated allegations in the media on factories as a primary source of Covid-19 infections and wishes to clear this misconception,” said Soh in a statement today. 

Quoting director-general of health Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah, Soh said Noor Hisham had recently told the business community that factories only account for 30% of workplace clusters. 

“This works out to be around only 6% of the total number of cases that can be attributed to factories. 

“Even more recently, MoH reported that only 15,069 (9.7%) out of a total of 156,105 infections cases from June 1 to 26, 2021 were attributed to the manufacturing sector,” he said. 

Soh said based on FMM’s own analysis from June 1 June 12, manufacturing cluster cases were well below the workplace cluster cases. 

“From our analysis of the official data published by MoH on their website, Telegram and social media platforms from June 1 to July 12, 2021, the daily new cluster-based cases reported have ranged between 1% and 17% of the overall cases reported daily. 

“In addition, manufacturing cluster cases over the same period as a percentage of the overall daily cases reported have ranged between 0.3% to 8.3%,” he said. 

Soh said it is unfair to blame the manufacturing sector for the high number of positive Covid-19 cases in the country.   

He however acknowledged that the risk of factory infections cannot be totally eliminated especially with the high percentage of sporadic cases and with the virus in the community. 

“This most certainly cannot be equated to the lack of Covid-19 standard operating procedure (SOP) compliance by factories and is a very unfair conclusion to be made. 

“With the rise in sporadic cases, managing the entry of infections into the factory or hostels has become more challenging for the industry despite the SOP and preventive measures in place including swab tests because the virus may still go into factories, especially through the asymptomatic sporadic cases. 

“These sources of infections are often not traced back to the community where it most likely originated from but to the factory when one community-related infection among the workers leads to more workers getting tested due to close contact tracing done.

“This in turn is reported as a workplace cluster by the authorities giving rise to the misconception that workplaces, especially factories, are the primary source of infection,” he said. 

Soh said the manufacturing sector must be allowed to continue to operate as businesses cannot be sustained if factory operations are closed. 

This he said will lead to knock-on effects in the economy with significant loss of jobs due to the extensive supply chains and networks involved in manufacturing. 

“If all factories are forced to shut, the impact would be most devastating on the economy. The manufacturing sector has been the pillar of economic growth as evident from the fourth quarter economic performance last year, where the manufacturing sector was the only economic sector with a positive growth of 3% and this performance continued in first quarter of this year with stronger growth where manufacturing led all other economic sectors with a growth of 6%. 

“If industries remain closed for too long, it could cause economic stagnation and irreparable damage to the economy including possible exodus of foreign investors and reduction in domestic investments,” he said. – July 14, 2021.