COMMENT | Urgent proactive steps needed to manage Covid-19 surge

COMMENT | There is light at the end of the tunnel. Our vaccination programme has accelerated to more than 400,000 shots per day, and already around 5 million Malaysians have received both shots and another 5 million have taken their first. Credit should be given to the ministries that have procured and are delivering these vaccines to our population. They are doing a good job in ramping up the vaccination exercise. This is a good sign for the nation – it means that we have the institutional capacity to design and deliver effective programmes when the cabinet commits to these programmes.

However, the end of the tunnel – the attainment of 80 percent vaccination cover for our population - is still several months away. (80 percent of 38 million is 30.4 million – the virus does not discern between citizens and the 6 million migrant workers in the country.) There is therefore the very real possibility that we will witness more surges of Covid infections in places outside the Klang Valley in the next few months as we have not achieved the vaccine coverage level we need to prevent explosive growth of clusters. The genie is out of the bottle, and our current movement control orders (MCOs) are not going to be able to put it back in. It will take a much stricter and prolonged MCO to achieve that, but that would adversely impact the economy and the livelihoods of many Malaysians. We do not have the social capital to embark on such a course. People are already quite irate.

The high number of...