LETTER | Learning from other countries in preventing Covid-19 resurgence

LETTER | Singapore was regarded as the gold standard in the Covid-19 control programme and yet they face a sudden unexpected case explosion with minimal readiness. Hong Kong is another and China celebrated its success in Wuhan and is also facing problems across the country now. 

It's clear that all the countries deployed a common approach in managing the outbreak and managed to contain it successfully but failed to address the subsequent outbreaks. They did not anticipate future outbreaks and did not have an adequate plan to counter future outbreaks since they were very confident that they managed to contain local epidemics. 

Malaysia being a latecomer to face the problems, should analyse and determine how it plans to do things differently compared to the neighbouring countries by taking into account local laws, resources and culture. We must accept and be prepared for another outbreak. It is on the horizon.

Our international borders need to be controlled. While we are doing a decent job in controlling movement at legal borders, it is common knowledge that we have failed to address the issue of illegal entry via the many "lorong tikus". 

We cannot close the international borders for long as it has other implications, the inbound passengers must be screened at the point of departure and people can only travel with an appropriate health clearance certificate.

Malaysia imposed a home quarantine in the early days on the tabligh clusters and this has been proven to be non-effective. A similar experience was also noticed in other countries. As such quarantine centres must not be closed but kept ready to accept any inbound travellers without appropriate health certificates or positive cases with mild symptoms. 

Such centres need to be operationally ready at designated places depending on the frequency and future outbreaks. We should not allow home quarantine for the near future.

Other countries did not impose travel restrictions when their first wave subsides. Free unrestricted and unconditional travel is now causing problems in many countries. While we may impose conditions for international travel for outbound travellers, we must not forget about domestic interstate travellers. 

Stringent conditions must be imposed on local activities. Travelling should be restricted from other zones to the green zone. All commercial premises must maintain a surveillance and temperature screening program for all employees and their contacts. 

Group events, irrespective if it is a religious or non-religious event need to be further deferred until the green zone has a prolonged period of stability. Apart from authorities doing the checking, community empowerment should be tapped. This was neglected by other countries.

While the active treatment services from Health Ministry (MOH) hospitals for Covid-19 can be stepped down, a certain level of resources should be maintained so that we are ready for a new spurt of cases. Quarantine centres need to be kept ready. 

MOH must ensure that there is a health rapid deployment force (RDF) that can attend to new cases in the community to isolate the problems. They can learn from the Armed Forces on how to develop and to operationalise the health RDF. 

Public health function needs to be stepped up. Significant resources must be committed for public health programmes, community surveillance and organisational audit on their readiness. 

The implementation of community and organisational surveillance is now part of public and occupational health. To combat Covid-19 at the workplace, these two agencies' functions need to be coordinated.

Mass behavioural psychology has been neglected by many countries. This group of professionals skills is needed to conduct mass behavioural adaptation using mass media to ensure adaptation on the yet to be defined new norms.  

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.

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