KUALA LUMPUR, April 28 ― The Ministry of Health (MOH) said today it has found that there was a wet market-to-wet market Covid-19 infection beginning from the Selayang wholesale market in Kuala Lumpur to other localities in the country.
In his daily Covid-19 press conference, its director-general Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said that the government believed that the infection which began in the wholesale market stemmed from the mass tabligh gathering cluster in the Seri Petaling Mosque.
“If you look at the wholesale market which is under the enhanced movement control order (EMCO), we believe there was a worker there who attended the Seri Petaling gathering. So, he infected others there.
“The total number of positive cases there is 74. Out of this number, 13 were not infected in the wholesale market.
“So, this would mean that there were traders from other markets who went to the wholesale market to purchase goods before taking it to other public wet markets, like Bahau for example,” explained Dr Noor Hisham.
He added that the moment the authorities have tracked down new infected cases from the cluster, they would immediately shut the market down for sanisation and decontamination procedures. The government will also conduct immediate contact tracing for the patient’s close contacts.
The same procedure is being applied to other markets including the one in Petaling Jaya’s Taman Megah and Jalan Othman, and the Chow Kit Market in the capital.
Furthermore, the government is utilising the same procedure for contact tracing that it had conducted during the first wave of Covid-19 in the country.
“We have conducted 15,000 screenings at the wholesale market and found 74 positive cases. The positive cases is not high for the amount of screenings that we do for persons under investigations and close contact.
“Our infection rate is roughly at four per cent and we are still conducting active case detection in the EMCO areas,” Dr Noor Hisham said.
