KUALA LUMPUR, July 16 — Malaysia’s Covid-19 testing rates are much lower than other countries because the country does not have as many cases as before, said Health director-general Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah.
He said there are not as many people coming in to hospitals to ask for testing and as such, the authorities are now focused on increasing surveillance on people with severe acute respiratory infection (SARI) and those with symptoms of the common flu.
“All our hospitals will test those with SARI for Covid-19 and also those with pneumonia. Also those with symptoms like runny nose etc. we will test them at our 26 sentinel clinics.
“Those who are asymptomatic like pre-operatives be it emergency, semi-emergency or elective we have routinely tested them,” he said.
“So now we see the results and positive cases are low. This is because the virus is well controlled in the population. If it’s not controlled well, we will see more cases in our wards and intensive care units.”
Malaysia’s rate of testing for Covid-19 was raised in Parliament yesterday by Opposition leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim.
Then today during his Covid-19 briefing, Dr Noor Hisham was asked by reporters to explain why the rate of testing was so low.
He proceeded to explain why Malaysia has conducted tests on 863,394 individuals which is roughly 27.14 per 1,000 population.According to the data prepared by the Crisis Preparedness and Response Centre (CPRC), Malaysia has done 1,577,417 (rt-PCR dan RTK-Antigen) tests. This number is due to some patients needing more than one test.
Countries like Vietnam are doing 2.7 tests per 1,000 population, Japan (4.1), South Korea (26.29), Singapore (79.83), Australia (114.15) and New Zealand (87.54).
“Our testing numbers are similar to South Korea and even though our testing capabilities have increased to 37,000 per day, positive cases are only at 1.05 per cent,” Dr Noor Hisham explained.
“This means around 99 per cent of the results of Covid-19 have been negative. This however doesn’t mean we should be lax in our efforts to eliminate the virus from society.
“We are increasing surveillance as mentioned earlier and we have reported 126 cases from our surveillance activities.”
Malaysia reported three new cases today. One was an imported case involving a local while the other two were foreigners. No local transmissions were reported today.
