HEALTH Minister Khairy Jamaluddin Abu Bakar should explain why after two weeks in office, Malaysia is still the world’s No. 7 in daily new COVID-19 cases and the world’s Top 3rd nation in daily COVID-19 deaths and when Malaysia will get out of the world’s Top 20 nations in both categories, said DAP’s Lim Kit Siang.
Latest data on Tuesday (Sept 14) indicated that Malaysia recorded 15,669 new COVID-19 cases, ranking as the world’s Top 7th in daily new COVID-19 cases after the United States (117,433), Turkey (27,802), India (27,4290), UK (26,628), Iran (22,329), Philippines (18,056).
According to Lim, in terms of daily COVID-19 deaths – the country recorded 463 deaths on Sept 14, 2021 – Malaysia only lost out to two other countries, namely the US with 1,826 COVID-19 deaths and Brazil (650 deaths).
Malaysia has even beaten Iran (408), India (280), Indonesia (250), the Philippines (222) and United Kingdom (185).
“In the last 13 days, Malaysia’s daily new COVID-19 cases had been hovering between 15,669 cases yesterday to 21,176 cases on Sept 10, while Indonesia had been scoring four-digit figures between 2,577 cases (on Sept 13) to 8,955 cases (on Sept 2),” Lim remarked.
He went on to question if Khairy could explain the reasons for this great discrepancy between the four-digit cases in Indonesia and the five-digit cases in Malaysia.
“In July, Khairy said that the new few months would be most crucial in Malaysia’s journey out of the woods from the COVID-19 pandemic with regard to the National Immunisation Programme (NIP).
“But instead of reaching the daily administration of half-a-million dosage of vaccine, there had been stalling in the vaccination process, the target reached was only quarter of a million in the last few days. Can Khairy explain?”
It was previously reported that Malaysia’s daily COVID-19 vaccine doses administered fell to 227,147 on Sept 13 from 227,476 the day before, bringing the cumulative number of shots given to recipients to 38.99 million.
A total of 21.57 million people (65.5%) of the nation’s population had received at least their first jab as of yesterday, including 17.48 million (53.5%) who were fully inoculated, according to the latest updates on Twitter today by the country’s Special Committee for Ensuring Access to COVID-19 Vaccine Supply (JKJAV), citing data from the COVID-19 Immunisation Task Force (CITF).
As for the Klang Valley, comprising Selangor, Putrajaya and Kuala Lumpur, about 7.04 million individuals (83.6%) of its total population had received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine as of Sept 13.
Among them, 6.37 million people (75.7%) of the Klang Valley’s population were fully vaccinated. – Sept 15, 2021.
