Combating a highly infectious virus as one people and one nation

COMMENT | Combating a highly infectious virus such as Covid-19 requires the coming together of people as one nation determined to give their best in a concerted effort to curb the spread of and ultimately, exterminate the virus.

What this means is the time has come for politics to be left on the backburner, along with criticisms that were done for the sake of putting down the authorities, as the situation is indeed very critical because of the triple digits growth in the number of new cases for the past several days - which also seen the first two deaths - with total infections ballooning to 790 as of March 18.

Let’s put the issue of why Pakatan Harapan menteri besars and chief ministers were left out of a special meeting to coordinate enforcement of the movement control order (MCO) in all states behind us, together with the issue of the lack of thinking through in introducing some measures related to the order.

Instead, let us focus on the rationale on why the order was introduced in the first place.

To sum it up, the order was introduced to flatten the curve on the spread of Covid-19. Simply put, this means to reduce the spread of the virus by influencing its transmission rate to below one.

Transmission of the disease is measured using the effective reproduction number (otherwise known as R), which tells us how many other people a typical Covid-19 case will infect on average.

If one person is expected to infect more than one other person, the infection will grow and create an outbreak. If a person infects less than one other, the infection will peter out.

Thus, the larger the value of R, the easier the virus spreads through a population and the higher the number of infections. For seasonal flu, experts estimate one infection leads on average to 1.4 new infections...