KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 3 — The health minister should immediately convene a national conference of both the public and private healthcare players along with civil society groups to develop new strategies to contain Covid-19 locally, said DAP’s Lim Kit Siang.

Lim said that while the ministry under Khairy Jamaluddin has brought the country’s cases down to the 10,000 level yesterday, Malaysia "urgently needed” a holistic approach in order to suppress these down to the double or single-digit levels.

"Khairy should convene a national conference on Covid-19 pandemic involving public and private health sectors and health NGOs and NGIs on how to bring daily new Covid-19 cases down to double-digit numbers and daily Covid-19 deaths to single-digit numbers

"A whole-of-society national conference to bring the daily new Covid-19 cases in Malaysia down to double-digit numbers and the daily Covid-19 deaths to single-digit numbers so that Malaysians can ‘live with Covid-19’ is urgently needed,” the Iskandar Puteri MP said in a statement today.

Malaysia over the past day reported the lowest number of cases and deaths since early July, with 10,915 new infections 109 Covid-19 related deaths were reported today.

Cumulatively, total positive cases now stands at 2.26 million, with 26,565 Covid-19 related deaths as of this morning.

Lim also said Khairy’s success in his first month in office in reducing these figures was "accompanied” by his failure to knock down cases numbers, especially deaths, towards double and single digits.

Lim then noted how neighbours Indonesia reported 568 Covid-19 deaths on August 30, the day Khairy took his oath into office, with only 89 fatalities yesterday.

"In contrast, 295 Covid-19 deaths were recorded in Malaysia on August 30 but we could only reduce it to 109 Covid-19 deaths yesterday.

"Yesterday, Indonesia recorded 1,413 daily new Covid-19 cases and looks likely to beat Malaysia to reduce its daily new Covid-19 cases to triple-digit numbers.

"In fact, for the last 31 days, the daily new Covid-19 cases in Indonesia had been in four-digit numbers while Malaysia had been struggling to reduce the new Covid-19 cases to below 10,000 cases,” Lim added.