KUALA LUMPUR, May 20 — The federal government must urgently increase the resources needed to detect undiagnosed Covid-19 patients and trace their close contacts, said Malaysian Medical Association (MMA) president Datuk Dr Subramaniam Muniandy.

He also said it should leverage the country’s nearly 2,500 general practitioners (GP) who have registered to participate in the National Immunisation Programme (NIP) to expedite the vaccination effort.

He urged the government to perform mass testing at the Covid-19 hotspots especially in Selangor to prevent further infections in the community.

Dr Subramaniam said the high number of sporadic cases and increase in infections recently is a sign that compliance with standard operating procedures was low and Covid-19 was spreading all over the country.

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“This is an indication that there are many who are unaware they are infected and are unknowingly spreading infections. Therefore, there is an urgent need to mass RTK Antigen screen people in all hotspots, quickly isolate the positive cases and trace close contacts to be tested to prevent further community transmission and deaths.

“It should be noted that there is an increase in brought-in-dead (BID) cases at hospitals as stated by the Health Ministry recently,” he said in a statement adding that in areas that are high risk, vaccinations en masse should be carried out.

In order to support the already fatigued medical frontliners, Dr Subramaniam proposed using medical and nursing students and medical assistants with basic knowledge to help with district health offices with contact tracing and administrative work.

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Adding to that, he said there are 2,500 GPs who can help in phase two and three of the vaccination programme but the government has yet to engage them.

“While there is notable progress in mass vaccinations around the country, disappointingly, there is still a lack of effort to onboard the private GPs as vaccinators in the NIP (National Immunisation Programme).

“There are 2,500 GPs registered under ProtectHealth to participate in Phase 2 and 3 of the NIP while a total 5,000 (GPs and staff) have received training for the programme, however only 37 GPs have been on-boarded to conduct the vaccinations. The rest of the trained GPs are waiting to be on-boarded.

“Vaccinations by the private GPs were targeted to begin in early May. With 2,500 GPs participating, an additional 75,000 vaccinations per day under the NIP can be carried out. We can expect this number to increase as many other GPs have expressed interest in participating,” he said.

Apart from that he also suggested that we consider vaccines from other manufacturers that have a proven record if there are issues with the current suppliers Pfizer, Astra Zaneca and Sinovac.

Malaysia recorded another high with 6,806 positive cases today.