KUALA LUMPUR, April 13 — Screening all of Malaysia for the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) would be a poor use of the country’s limited resources based on findings in areas under an enhanced movement control order (EMCO), said Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah.
The Health director-general said active case detection work in such locations were returning very low positive results, which he suggested to be indicative of the country in general.
While some such as South Korea have made widespread testing the foundation of their efforts against Covid-19, Dr Noor Hisham said Malaysia could be more effective by aggressively concentrating its Covid-19 tests on high-risk groups instead.
“We only found 0.5 per cent positive (from the mandatory testing). Which means if we screen 1,000 people, the percentage is only 0.5 per cent. So, the detection rate is very low.
“So, in that sense, we believe that in a community we are able to do much more in that sense whether we should do a test, test, test for everybody, or do we prefer to do test, test for a targeted group, site, (or) targeted high-risk group.
“And then perhaps we can get a better outcome with the limited amount of resources that we have. Then we can focus into that area and focus into that high-risk group, perhaps that has high-impact, (with) reasonable cost with the limited resources that we have and we get good outcome,” said Dr Noor Hisham.
So far, the MOH has screened 83,488 cases in Malaysia with only 4,817 positive result or just 5.8 per cent compared to the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) benchmark of around 10 per cent for countries’ Covid-19 infection rates.
Dr Noor Hisham said the two data points did not make a strong case for the mass testing of the entire population.
The Health Ministry already has a backlog of Covid-19 tests pending as it has yet to find a suitable rapid testing method for the disease. Previous candidates were prone to returning false positives and negatives.
