KUALA LUMPUR, June 2 — The country’s seven-day rolling average for Covid-19 infections has now deviated from a Health Ministry forecast for Malaysia to reach 13,000 daily cases in two weeks’ time, in the first signs that efforts to flatten the curve were working.

According to data Health director-general Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah shared early this morning, the seven-day moving average has hovered around 8,000 cases for the past three days.

This was a departure from the steady incline since the middle of May.

“The infectivity rate of Covid-19, or the R0/Rt, forecast based on daily cases since June 1 for the entire country was 1.07,” he also said on Twitter.

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This was also the third consecutive day that the Rt has fallen.

After hitting an alarming 9,020 cases on May 29, Malaysia’s daily Covid-19 cases have dropped back down to 6,000-7,000 range.

However, some medical professionals still argue that the high positivity rate of over 7 per cent from all tests performed indicated that Malaysia’s cases were still being under-reported.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has set a positivity rate of 5 per cent as a proxy indicator for adequate testing, with higher rates suggesting that a country was not performing enough tests to detect Covid-19.

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