Covid-19 (Jan 5): 3,270 cases, infectivity rate holding steady

COVID-19 | The Health Ministry reported 3,270 new Covid-19 cases today, bringing the cumulative infections to 2,773,156.

They were more than the number of Covid-19 patients who recovered, which totalled 3,195. This is expected to contribute to a rise in the number of active cases.

• Patients in ICU: 257
• Intubated: 137

Nationally, the number of hospital admissions of confirmed Covid-19 patients in the last seven days have declined by 1.3 percent compared to the preceding week.

The top three hospitals with the highest hospital bed utilisation rate are Kedah (82 percent), Kelantan (79 percent) and Malacca (79 percent).

The infectivity rate remained stagnant at 0.99 since the start of the year. It must be kept under 1.0 to prevent exponential growth in fresh infections.

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 (Jan 4), where 2,842 new cases were reported, is as follow:

Selangor (514)
Kelantan (397)
Johor (284)
Sabah (258)
Kedah (237)
Penang (230)
Kuala Lumpur (206)
Pahang (146)
Terengganu (138)
Negeri Sembilan (117)
Malacca (105)
Perak (101)
Perlis (45)
Putrajaya (35)
Sarawak (24)
Labuan (5)

The fresh infections in population centres such as Selangor and Johor have generally been on the downtrend however Perlis saw a slight surge, recording the highest number of cases in 28 days.

To date, 195 Covid-19 clusters are still active, including 4 new clusters reported today.

The ongoing clusters have fallen by 14.1 percent from the 227 active clusters a week ago.

[More to follow]