A 36-YEAR-OLD woman, who was declared dead on arrival (DOA) at Bau Hospital on Saturday, was one of three such Covid-19 cases in Sarawak, the state disaster management committee said today.

In reporting the cause of the woman’s death, the committee said she had no history of serious illness, aside from physical disabilities.

The other two cases were that of an 81-year-old woman and a 70-year-old man who were declared DOA at Pusa health clinic on August 21 and August 23 respectively.

Pusa is a coastal town in the Betong division about 110km from Kuching. As there is no Covid-19 testing facility in Betong, all samples are sent to Kuching by road.

The man and woman had comorbidities, the disaster committee said. The woman suffered from hypertension, diabetes, and high cholesterol, while the man also had hypertension and heart problems.

The other four deaths reported today were a 63-year-old Serian man who died in Serian Hospital; a 72-year-old Bintulu man and a 76-year-old Simunjan man, who died at Sarawak General Hospital in Kuching; and a 79-year-old Pakan man who died in Sarikei Hospital.

The disaster committee did not state when they died, except to say the Serian man tested positive for the virus on Sunday, the Bintulu man tested positive on August 20, and the Simunjan man and the Pakan man both on August 30.

There were 3,200 new cases today, with only eight reported category 5 cases (critical patients with multiple organs complications).

The opposition blamed the ruling Gabungan Parti Sarawak (GPS) coalition and the disaster committee for failing to handle the situation.

However, Tupong assemblyman Fazzrudin Abdul Rahman accused the opposition of “instilling panic and anxiety among the masses” by leveraging “on the misinformation and ignorance of the people, who took the daily figures of Covid-19 at face value”.

“As political parties claiming to represent the people, they should at least make an effort to understand the gravity of the current situation, which is aggravated by the spread of the Delta variant, before issuing knee-jerk reactions,” Fazzrudin said.

He said the opposition seemed to have ignored the daily statistics, which stated 99% of the new cases reported daily are in category 1 (no symptoms) and category 2 (mild symptoms).

He said, if the opposition did so, then it would be aware it indicates Sarawak is in an endemic phase.

He said director-general of health Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah concurred with this assessment in a Facebook post yesterday.

Nonetheless, he called on the disaster committee to clarify the state’s current Covid-19 strategy, whether the anti-pandemic fight is in the mitigation or containment phase.

In the former, the strategy reportedly will be only to test symptomatic cases but in the latter phase, there will be mass testing, which in turn could lead to higher Covid-19 cases.

That, Fazzrudin said, will set the alarm bells ringing among members of the public, who are fixated on assessing the current situation based on the number of cases alone. – September 7, 2021.