Dear NSC, please consult health professionals - Doctor's message

COMMENT | The Covid 19 situation in our country is at a critical stage.

The mass religious gatherings involving thousands of devotees in Sri Petaling and in Batu Ferringhi should not have taken place at this time.

A huge spike of cases has already begun emanating from the former event.

Given this, the two-week Movement Control Order (MCO) announced by the prime minister on Monday (March 16) was quite timely and entirely appropriate.

We need to cut transmission, identify and treat those infected and quarantine the contacts.

These measures will help contain the epidemic. Wuhan managed to limit the total number infected to about 80,000, which is less than 0.14 percent of Wuhan’s 60 million population, despite the fact that when the epidemic started they had no clue what was going on.

We, being forewarned should be able to do better than that, and until the Sri Petaling event, were doing very well by global standards.

So the MCO is quite appropriate. However several of the measures implemented by the National Security Council (NSC) yesterday undermined the...