KUCHING: Malaysia needs to reflect on the coming year and ask where it is going as a nation with the current Covid-19 outbreak with no immediate end, said a senior consultant paediatrician Dato’ Dr Amar-Singh HSS.
According to him, the country’s healthcare professionals ‘are fatigued and the system is not able to cope’.
“This long-drawn-out pandemic has eaten into the emotional reserves of our health care professionals. They need our compassion and support,” he said in a statement.
Dr Amar-Singh said Malaysia could not keep looking at and be affected by the day-to-day numbers of reported cases.
He suggested that the country would stop looking at these numbers as they were just a factor of the scale of testing, how wide and how many tests it did each day.
“Models suggest we are missing at least three to four times as many cases as we detect, perhaps higher. In addition, it is important to note that our testing remains very limited and is being restricted.
“For example, we hear in some states of restrictions placed on general practitioners (GPs) on how many tests they can do per day because the system cannot cope with pick-ups and placements of persons detected as Covid-19 positive,” he pointed out.
He said because of this, the public did not get a full picture of the true situation and could not respond appropriately, allowing for fake news to abound.
He added that whistle-blowers tended to get victimised.
The ingrained mentality to always hide unpleasant truths must stop, he said, opining that the country had one problem – a major trust deficit.
“We have used MCO (Movement Control Order) as a tool to try and mute the spread of Covid-19, especially in the face of our limited testing response. But this cannot continue as it now harms a significant portion of the population. Vaccines offer us much hope, but we will have to see how they will work in the real world context, to control the pandemic from spreading, and allow some return to an active society. Even then we will have to maintain many SOPs (standard operating procedures) for the coming year at least.”
For Malaysia to have a ‘hopeful 2021’, Dr Amar-Singh said the country would need transparency to move forward.
He said Malaysians must not learn about things first ‘from the whispers on social media and cries for help on Twitter or Facebook’.
Instead, they must learn it first from the authorities, no matter how unpalatable the situation.
“The public must not be given parts of the information or parts of the truth; they must be given the whole truth. Sharing extensive data openly is the only way we can work together as a nation. This is the way we can mobilise everyone and can be united as a nation to fight this scourge.”
He also said it was time to stop fining and arresting the average citizen for SOP violations.
The failure of some elected representatives in government to maintain effective SOPs and the lack of penalty for them was a major thorn in the side of the public, he added.
He felt that the government had to get ‘your own house in order’ first given that some government departments had not embraced the SOPs, as could be seen from their image posts of recent official meetings and gatherings.
“It is time to continue supporting health staff and not discourage them with threats of disciplinary action for lapses in SOP. We must also stop the negativity towards our economic migrant workers – they have contributed to the development of our nation and we must support them in this pandemic.”
Dr Amar-Singh added that encouraging compliance with leadership-by-example and taking responsibility for failures should be the requirements.
He also proposed an ongoing national dialogue to chart the best way forward for Malaysia.
He said no one could see the unknown or predict accurately what was going to happen with Covid-19 in the near future.
It was thus important that the community was encouraged to express critical opinions and learn from each other, he said.
“We must stop this culture of trying to silence individuals who speak or share divergent views on how to tackle the outbreak.”
Given the limited resources and support put into dealing with this pandemic, he said the country needed to ramp up its support and initiatives.
He suggested that Malaysia would absorb all the healthcare manpower available before losing them to its neighbours.
“No one should be left on a contract job – all medical officers, pharmacists, nurses or other allied health staff on contracts – should be offered permanent posts immediately.
“This should include the thousands of medical or pharmacy graduates waiting to get a job.
“We must ramp up our testing capacity considerably to enable the end to the MCO.”
According to Dr Amar-Singh, using extended MCO as a control measure without wide-scale testing would only damage the economy.
He said the country had to do at least 100,000 antigen tests per day for community screening and reserve-PCR for symptomatic admissions.
“On-going, significant improvement in health infrastructure is vital. We need to extensively support those who are suffering in this time, those who have lost their jobs, are struggling financially and have no food security.
“This has still not been fully resolved by government agencies.
“Truth must be spoken, and we cannot hide the reality of the Covid-19 situation and impact on the country.
“Any attempt to do so will only harm the nation.
“Our hope, as always, is in the people of this nation who will rise to any challenge if they are given the information, opportunity and freedom,” said Dr Amar-Singh.