Covid-19 (Nov 18): 6,380 cases, Labuan experiencing a surge

COVID-19 | The Health Ministry today reported 6,380 new Covid-19 cases today, bringing the cumulative infections to 2,569,533.

The fresh infections today are more than the number of Covid-19 patients who recovered, which totalled 5,760. This is expected to contribute to a rise in the number of active cases.

• Patients in ICU: 541
• Intubated: 263

Nationally, hospital admissions have been on the rise, increasing by five percent in the last seven days compared to the preceding week.

The rise was largely contributed by Kuala Lumpur (+47.2 percent), Negeri Sembilan (+23.8 percent), Kedah (+15.6 percent), Perak (+11.9 percent), Johor (+11.9 percent) and Selangor (+11.5 percent) during the said period.

Beginning Oct 9, the Health Ministry will only publish today's breakdown of new cases by states after midnight on its CovidNow portal.

The breakdown by states for yesterday (Nov 17), where 6,288 new cases were reported, is as follows:

Selangor (1,615)
Kelantan (804)
Sabah (599)
Johor (538)
Kedah (425)
Kuala Lumpur (403)
Pahang (377)
Sarawak (300)
Terengganu (299)
Negeri Sembilan (244)
Perak (243)
Penang (221)
Malacca (137)
Putrajaya (28)
Labuan (28)
Perlis (27)

Labuan, which had been the poster child for vaccination's success against new infection, reported the highest number of cases in 116 days since July 25.

The R-naught (Covid-19 case reproduction rate) in Labuan is at 1.29 the highest in the country, suggesting that the virus is spreading in the territorty.

Genomic surveillance

The Health Ministry has reported sequencing results from 88 Covid-19 samples this week, all of which turn out to be the Delta variant.

Eighty-eight of the samples were sequenced by the University of Malaya faculty of medicine, and another 23 were sequenced by the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Medical Molecular Biology Institute.

The first local Delta variant case was detected in May, and it quickly supplanted the Beta variant as the dominant variant Malaysia in the following months.

Clusters

To date, 246 Covid-19 clusters are still active, including nine new clusters reported today.

The ongoing clusters have fallen by 14.6 percent from the 288 active clusters a week ago.

Details of the new clusters are expected to be updated on the CovidNow website later.