Covid-19 (Dec 2): 5,806 cases, R-naught steady at 0.95

COVID-19 | The Health Ministry reported 5,806 new Covid-19 cases today - the highest in a week.

The fresh infections today were surpassed by 7,246 Covid-19 patients who recovered today. This is expected to help reduce the number of active cases.

New cases over the past 30 days have stood at a similar range.

Hospital admission of Covid-19 patients has been trending down over the past week. Utilisation of hospital beds reserved for Covid-19 patients is 36.8 percent.

According to the Health Ministry's CovidNow website, there are no states over the past week facing a drastic increase in admissions of Covid-19 patients.

The states of Malacca and Terengganu currently have a bed utilisation rate of above 80 percent. However, bed utilisation is a dynamic number as hospitals can repurpose other parts of their facility to cater to a surge in admissions.

• Patients in ICU: 511
• Intubated: 266

The R-naught for the country has been below 1.00 since Nov 24. The only regions where the R-naught is above 1.00 are Perlis, Penang, and Labuan.

The breakdown of new cases by states for today will only be reported by the Health Ministry after midnight. Below are the figures for yesterday:

Selangor (1,582)
Kelantan (639)
Johor (488)
Sabah (467)
Kedah (366)
Kuala Lumpur (326)
Pahang (326)
Penang (292)
Terengganu (235)
Perak (205)
Negeri Sembilan (180)
Malacca (124)
Sarawak (121)
Perlis (48)
Putrajaya (21)
Labuan (19)

Genomic surveillance

A total of 515 Covid-19 samples have undergone full genome sequencing from Nov 25 to Dec 2, all of which turn out to be the Delta variant.

Malaysia has not detected the presence of the newly identified Omicron variant to date - whether local or imported - but Singapore has reported two imported cases today.

The sequencing this week was carried out by the University Malaysia Sarawak’s Institute of Health and Community Medicine (415 samples), UKM Medical Molecular Biology Institute (46 samples), Malaysia Genome & Vaccine Insitute (44 samples), and the Tropical Infectious Diseases Research & Education Centre (10 samples).

According to the genetic database Gisaid, Malaysia has sequenced and shared 0.23 percent of its Covid-19 cases with the scientific community over the past 90 days, which is 103rd highest in the world terms of percentage of cases sequenced and shared.

Clusters

To date, 227 Covid-19 clusters are still active, including six new clusters reported today.

The ongoing clusters have fallen by 3.4 percent from the 235 active clusters a week ago.

Details of the clusters will be posted on the CovidNow website.