LETTER | Let us first acknowledge Dr Amar Singh HSS who first alerted us of the risk we are now clearly facing in his piece, “Beware the fifth wave of Covid-19”.
The infectivity rate or R-Naught as measured by the Health Ministry (MOH) has been sustainably higher than 1.0, indicating pandemic levels, for about two weeks.
The fifth wave of Covid-19 is upon us, with Parti Pejuang Tanah Air (Pejuang) Research's own projection as depicted below showing infection numbers breaching the 10,000 a day level within a week, and 12,000 within the Merdeka month of August if all remains the same.
Unfortunately, two other aspects of Covid-19 management are falling short of current challenges:
a. The vaccination programme under the National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme (NIP) will help, eventually, but not fast enough to save us from the current crisis. As of yesterday, even with the recent ramp-up of vaccinations, less than 30 percent of our adult population has received at least one dose of the vaccine, whilst less than half of them fully vaccinated. This is far from herd immunity requirements.
b. Of additional concern, the testing levels are still well short of the international benchmark, despite the best efforts of the MOH. Adequate testing is indicated when positivity rates of tests are below five percent. It has not been that low in Malaysia since early May and has been above eight percent since the beginning of July, indicating a high risk that many untested Covid-19 positive individuals are freely, unsuspectingly, infecting others.
With images of ICUs swamped across the nation inundating social media, and death rates climbing, surely the government has to acknowledge that their National Recovery Plan, needs a re-plan? So what should the re-plan incorporate or enhance which is not there at the moment?
1) The re-plan should be transparent and realistic. The government should move away from announcing plans and proclaiming actions with an overly optimistic bent. Whatever plans the government announces becomes a basis for the whole nation to plan, be it businesses to prepare when to resume activities, parents to arrange their children’s return to school, etc.
a) Unrealistic plans, upon announcement, cause confusion, resulting in a cascade of failures in the implementation of the plans beginning from government agencies, through to the private sector, voluntary organisations and ultimately the people.
b) It burdens rather than assists others that rely on those plans. Regrettably, in the absence of other information to moderate the government’s declared plans, much time, money and resources are wasted as a result of this.
c) The government loses credibility, making it increasingly difficult for it to deliver on the current or any subsequent plans.
2) The re-plan should be a proper plan. The National Recovery Plan should not be put together in a hurry, let alone be announced hastily. Key elements should be incorporated from the outset, not retrofitted. The plan should have the flexibility for change, but the aim should be for it to be robust enough to retain around 80 percent of its key elements barring catastrophic changes unforeseen during planning. For instance, a plan drawn up before the impact of the Delta variant was fully understood may need significant change, but not one drawn up after the crisis in India.
3) The re-plan should be drawn up by the best subject matter experts of Malaysia. The impact of Covid-19 is over-arching, impacting not just the nation’s physical health, but also the economy, social welfare, education, religious practices. In fact, there is hardly anything not impacted by Covid-19, but for the purposes of planning, focus on a few key areas would allow for recovery to cascade across other areas. It is in these key areas that we need the said experts, ideally those with broad-based, real-world experience.
4) The re-plan should reflect upon the successes and failures of others. We are not alone, and as we now face our own struggles, there are many others we can learn from. Just drawing on the experiences of New Zealand, Thailand, Korea, Taiwan and many others, much can be learned to strengthen the re-plan. For illustration, consider the stories of three nations, the US, the UK and Japan:
a) How has the US recovered and sustained its recovery from Covid-19 since being among the worst-hit nations at the end of 2020? Has the change in leadership there been so significant and what actions has President Joe Biden taken to achieve this?
b) How is it that the UK, the most highly vaccinated country in Europe, is now suffering from a spike in Covid-19 cases? What actions or policies by their PM, Boris Johnson, precipitated this? What could they have done differently?
c) How has Japan, a country with such high population density, and with a vaccine programme that is running at a just slightly faster pace than Malaysia, been able to maintain low infection rates? Is there some practice there that better protects the Japanese from the pandemic?
5) The re-plan should clearly translate to executable action plans. These action plans should be driven by specific priorities such as:
a) Closing the Covid-19 testing gap.
b) Ruthlessly prioritising resources to vaccinations and more ICU capacity building.
c) Ensuring all citizens are safe, with all necessities catered for, specifically food, housing and utilities.
d) Relieving all burdens of debt or cost from the people, at the cost of those that can afford it; ie government, GLCs, and flourishing industries such as gloves. Tax payments to the Inland Revenue Board can be suspended, loan moratoriums should not be interest-bearing and all licences, permits as well as penalty fees to the government, be waived.
Tengku Zafrul Abdul Aziz, our finance minister and the man now in charge of the National Recovery Plan, has already sought out a meeting with Pejuang chairperson Dr Mahathir Mohamad.
It augurs well that he has done so, but he should be prepared to listen clearly to how the current plan by the government has failed and accept that a re-plan is necessary.
He should see merit in Mahathir’s proposal for a National Recovery Council (NOC) that transcend politics. The above elements of a re-plan are just the beginning of what NOC would do.
Actually, it is not a re-plan we need. We need a fresh plan, from a blank slate, put together by the right people, with the right expertise, experience, authority and most importantly, the right priorities, to save our people, our nation, from oblivion.
The writer is the head of research, Parti Pejuang Tanah Air (Pejuang).
The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.
