BAKRI MP Yeo Bee Yin has renewed her calls for the Government to take actions to improve the Find, Test, Trace, Isolate and Support (FTTIS) approach.
In a statement today, she pointed out that the Government cannot rely solely on vaccination to manage the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic as efforts are underway to reopen the country’s economy.
“A multi-pronged strategy is needed and an effective FFTIS is definitely one of the most important elements to be added,” she explained.
According to the former energy, science, technology, environment and climate change minister, a number of health experts and members of parliament have been calling for more testing to be done according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendation of a positive rate of 5% or lower.
“In fact, countries which are successful in controlling the spread of the virus such as China went way below 1% in their positive rate,” she added.
The Health Ministry had recently released more granular testing numbers which showed that from Aug 11 to 26, the positive rate of all states or territories (except Labuan) recorded above 5% with more than 10 states or territories above 10%.
Meanwhile, four states – Kedah, Kelantan, Sabah, and Selangor – are above 15%.
“In short, we are severely under-testing our population and our daily positive cases number, although high, is under-reported.
“Not only that, our contact-tracing mechanism is almost fully manual while other countries, which are successful in controlling the spread of virus, are using much better and sophisticated data analytics to allow for more comprehensive tracing to be done on close contacts.
“MyTrace, which is a tracing application launched by our current minister of health when he was minister of science, has not been making any significant impact in tracing, nor is MySejahtera,” Yeo noted.
According to Yeo, the current testing and tracing system is totally incapable of tracing the pattern of spreading of the virus.
“With severely insufficient testing and primitive method in tracing, it is impossible to isolate the positive cases effectively to prevent further spreading in the community,” she added.
The health expert and opposition parties have been demanding the Government to strengthen the FTTIS approach, which was perceived as the weakest link in Malaysia’s pandemic management strategy. – Sept 1, 2021
