KUALA LUMPUR, March 30 — The government is thinking about scrapping the check-in feature from the MySejahtera Covid-19 tracker application, pending its observation of the infection situation after Malaysia’s border reopens fully in two days’ time.
Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin said that the Health Ministry would be observing the mobility and infection patterns for several weeks after April 1, before making a decision.
“We want to see, with the border reopening and also with the exemptions that we will give beginning April 1, if there are changes in the mobility pattern and also the infection pattern for several weeks. If there are no significant changes, then we can stop.
“I just want to wait for a while. When the border reopens and with the fasting month exemptions etc, I want to see if there are changes in the mobility and also infections, where they happen. Those things we still have in the MySejahtera data.
“If it does not change much, then we can drop it,” he said, referring to the feature.
Khairy was speaking to the press after the closing ceremony of MyVIFiter 1.0 Integrated Weight Management Programme and World Physical Activity Day (WOPAD) 2022 in Putrajaya.
Earlier today, the Malaysian Medical Association (MMA) said that the MySejahtera application is no longer useful for tracing Covid-19 close contacts as part of measures to curb the pandemic.
Its president Dr Koh Kar Chai urged the government to consider ending the use of the app to scan codes before entry into premises as the nation transitions towards endemicity.
“The use of MySejahtera allowed contact tracing to be done during the height of the pandemic, a feat that would have been impossible without the MySejahtera app.
“However, it may have outlived its usefulness as a contact tracing app. With the large numbers of positive cases within and surrounding us, contact tracing will not be adopted on a wide scale as it will not yield the expected results,” he said in a statement.
Unlike others pushing for the app to be retired, Dr Koh suggested that MySejahtera still had its uses and should be adapted for use as a personal health record, since it is already linked to individual identities and is non-transferable.
He noted the country currently lacks a centralised management system to record the health of its population.
