Dr Muzaffar Syah Mallow
KUCHING: The government should extend the Movement Control Order (MCO) for a few more weeks until at least the end of June or early July, proposed Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (Usim) Faculty of Syariah and Law senior lecturer Dr Muzaffar Syah Mallow.
Dr Muzaffar said such a move would help contain the spread of Covid-19 and ensure that the novel coronavirus would no longer become a serious health threat or concern to the community.
“The government has enforced the MCO since March 18 in phases and the existing phase will end on April 28.
“It is still too early to put an end to the MCO as the risk of Covid-19 infections still exists in the country. We must not forget, Covid-19 is a new virus which is deadly and highly contagious,” he said in a statement today.
Muzaffar said extreme measures such as continuing to enforce the MCO must be taken in order to stop the spread of Covid-19, which has no vaccine yet.
The enforcement of the MCO, he observed, had shown to be effective in bringing down the number of Covid-19 infections in the country.
By extending the MCO period, he believed that the virus infection rate could be further brought down and subsequently the threat of Covid-19 to the public could be put to an end.
Even though the number of new Covid-19 positive cases had gone down in recent days, he said Malaysians must not regard this as a success.
“We must remember the number of Covid-19 infection is still on the rise globally. Our close neighbours, namely Singapore and Indonesia also have reported a drastic increase in the number of Covid-19 infections.
He noted that the Ministry of Health (MoH) was also carrying out “aggressive detection processes for the virus among the public in order to detect any infections, especially among foreign workers”.
He feared that the MoH’s efforts would be in vain if the MCO was lifted prematurely.
“We should also give enough room and time to MoH to properly monitor all the recovered patients from such virus in order to avoid the re-emergence of the virus in their bodies.
“Due to these reasons, extension of the MCO in the country should be carried out,” he added.