Ex-health minister: Selangor COVID-19 cases may rise with proactive testing but don’t despair

Selangor’s spike in new COVID-19 cases indicated that the aggressive and proactive testing in the state was working, former health minister Datuk Seri Dzulkefly Ahmad said today.

He also cautioned against using new daily cases as an effective benchmark for how Malaysia and the state were faring in the fight against COVID-19, saying this was counterproductive to active case detection.

Cases have been yo-yoing in Selangor, going from 277 on Wednesday to 845 the next day and 829 yesterday, which represented nearly half of Malaysia’s new infections reported.

Dzulkelfly acknowledged that the figures were disheartening but said it was not reason to surrender to the pandemic.

“Beware! Numbers may rise further. Why? Because now we are doing more testing, especially mandatory (tests) on foreign workers.

“But don’t despair!” he said on Twitter.

The former minister said the high numbers should instead be viewed as the efficacy of the additional testing in weeding out COVID-19 cases that would otherwise not have been detected.

Discovering and isolating such cases was crucial in order to contain the pandemic, he added.

Rather than stopping at mandatory testing for migrant workers, he said the Selangor COVID-19 Task Force was instead pushing for more detection measures such as testing at-risk communities and thoroughly investigating sporadic infections.

While policies resulting in high numbers would be unpopular as they suggested shortcomings in the state and country’s efforts to contain COVID-19, Dzulfefly said it was far more dangerous and deadly to pursue measures that mask the severity of the disease.

Malaysia was still performing far better in limiting the number of deaths due to COVID-19, he said.

Since the Sabah state election in September, Malaysia has been assailed by a third wave of COVID-19 infections that far eclipsed all cases accumulated up to then.

While it took seven months until September for Malaysia to record its first 10,000 cases, the next 10,000 came in October itself.

From end-October to yesterday, Malaysia added over 60,000 cases for a current total of 80,309

However, the country has also introduced more aggressive testing measures specifically targeting foreign worker populations after it was concluded that workplace clusters were the main source of new COVID-19 infections at the moment. — Malay Mail

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