Covid-19 (March 28): 13,336 new cases, R-number falls to 0.93

COVID-19 | The Health Ministry said 13,336 new daily Covid-19 cases were reported yesterday.

This was much lower than the seven day average of 20,179 which suggested that new cases are trending down.

The last time new daily cases were this low was on Feb 8.

Malaysia is seeing similar downtrends in key Covid-19 metrics - active cases, deaths, hospitalisation and intensive care bed use.

According to health director-general Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah, the R-number reached 0.93 yesterday. A R-number below 1.00 suggests that the spread of Covid-19 was slowing down.

New cases according to states are as follows:

Selangor (6,509)
Kuala Lumpur (1,317)
Johor (856)
Kedah (779)
Penang (640)
Negeri Sembilan (488)
Perak (482)
Sarawak (470)
Terengganu (418)
Pahang (413)
Kelantan (328)
Malacca (309)
Sabah (194)
Perlis (52)
Putrajaya (49)
Labuan (32)

Another 54 deaths attributed to Covid-19 were reported yesterday, of which 16 were declared as "brought in dead".

Over the past week, an average of 54.3 people were reported to have died of Covid-19, against an average of 73.6 for the past 30 days.

Since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, a total of 34,842 deaths have been attributed to Covid-19.

There has been 2,094 reported Covid-19 deaths this month. For comparison, there were 770 deaths last month and 491 deaths in January.

Malaysia has the highest number of deaths per capita in the Asean and East Asian regions with 1,046 deaths per 1 million population, and fourth-worst in Asia after Iran, Lebanon and Jordan – all in the Middle East.

Most of the new deaths were reported in Selangor (13) followed by Perak (9), Kuala Lumpur (8), Kedah (5), Negeri Sembilan (5), Johor (3), Sarawak (3), Terengganu (3), Kelantan (2), Malacca (2) and Penang (1).

There are 4,988 Covid-19 patients hospitalised of which 288 are in intensive care.

According to Noor Hisham, there are two states - Kuala Lumpur and Selangor - where the use of Covid-19 beds specially meant for Covid-19 patients are above 50 percent.

As for non-intensive care beds, the utilisation rate is highest in Putrajaya (87 percent) and Selangor (73 percent).