No overcrowding of hospitals due to Covid-19: Health DG
COVID-19 | The Health Ministry has denied an allegation that its hospitals are facing overcrowding issues due to Covid-19 and had to reject patients with other illnesses.
Its director-general Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said such claims are baseless, as the ministry has a total of 147 hospitals nationwide and only 45 of them are used to treat Covid-19...
COVID-19 | The Health Ministry has denied an allegation that its hospitals are facing overcrowding issues due to Covid-19 and had to reject patients with other illnesses.
Its director-general Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said such claims are baseless, as the ministry has a total of 147 hospitals nationwide and only 45 of them are used to treat Covid-19.
"We also provide quarantine centres for low-risk Covid-19 patients with no symptoms or who are only showing mild symptoms (of the virus).
"So for these two categories, we are not using hospital beds. The quarantine centres have a total of 14,754 beds, which can also be used for Category 3 (symptomatic) patients should we need to free up space in hospitals," he told reporters during a press conference in Putrajaya today.
Noor Hisham was answering a question on claims made by several members of the public, alleging that they were told to seek treatment at private hospitals due to non-availability of beds at government health facilities.
Besides government hospitals, the ministry is also assisted by two university hospitals to treat Covid-19 patients, he added.
To increase the work capacity for non-pandemic cases, hospitals also conduct elective surgeries after normal working hours, including weekends.
Noor Hisham said that they have adopted the strategy of cluster hospitals as well, which sees specialist hospitals sharing resources with smaller facilities.
This strategy also allows the outsourcing of non-Covid-19-related cases to other facilities including private hospitals.
Meanwhile, on contact tracing activities in states with high numbers of positive cases, the ministry is considering bringing back some of its officers from Peninsular who are helping operations in Sabah.
According to the Health director-general, they have received requests from Selangor and Negeri Sembilan, which are facing a spike in cases, to have their staff in Sabah returned to beef up operations in their respective states.
"Since the trend of cases in Sabah is going down, we are considering the requests," he said.
To a question on the UK's approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for use, Noor Hisham told reporters that Malaysia would monitor its effectiveness first.
He said the UK and several other countries have a law where they can approve the registration of a vaccine through an emergency procedure.
However, Malaysia does not have such a law and health authorities would have to follow every step of the process to register a vaccine.
"Next week they will be receiving 47 million of the vaccine. And we will monitor their use in the UK, to see the effectiveness and side effects.
"Now it is still in the early stage, and everyone needs to watch for possible side effects. This is the worry that many countries have," he added.
Meanwhile in a related development, Reuters reported that Pfizer is now seeking full marketing authorisation in the UK in parallel with the emergency use authorisation.
It would use the same data that was used to obtain the emergency use authorisation.
The report said shipments of the vaccine could reach UK warehouses as soon as this weekend, but deliveries cannot begin until regulators give the green light.
Regulators will assess each batch of the vaccine for quality, the report added.
Report this comment
Are you sure you want to delete this comment?
This action cannot be undone.