In response to Stephen Ng’s ‘Necessary to review decision to re-open schools’ — M. Rajen

MARCH 8 — I write to you in response to the opinion piece published by Malay Mail dated March 7, 2021, but this is an open letter and desperate appeal to Minister of Education and his team as well as educators, regulators and all parent-teachers grouping in the country.

Early on today, millions of our kids will go to school – 10 days short of 18^th March 2020 – the 1^st anniversary of Malaysia’s national lockdown.

A vast majority of these kids would not be qualified to be vaccinated and cannot be made to “wait for the vaccine” like everyone else. If you take out the economic mayhem that the pandemic precipitated, you could easily argue that these kids have been the demographic that suffered the most. This is more so for kids arising from the rural areas who had little or no tools to access online education.
A student has his temperature checked at Sekolah Kebangsaan Cator Avenue, Ipoh as schools reopen March 1, 2021. — Picture by Farhan Najib

The move to get them back to school is controversial and fraught with many risks – the biggest being a rise Covid-19 infection that would force another lockdown. This would truly be an unmitigated disaster.

Testing and just quarantining those are Covid-19, will not only prevent an outbreak, it would live to on for our kids without the threat of a lockdown.

I am appalled that mass antigen testing is not one of containment strategies. In the last 12 months, the technology in rapid antigen testing has improved significantly in terms of speed (under 20 minutes), specificity (more than 90%) and accuracy (in excess of 95%).

A few hours after our kids report at school, kids in England will be doing the same too. The BBC reported that free Covid tests will be offered to the families of all pupils in England under plans to reopen schools. The kits will be provided twice a week to pupils. These kits will also be available to adults who work with schools, such as teaching staff, bus drivers and after-school club leaders.

Public Health England said testing would help “uncover hidden cases” and break chains of transmission and Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said it would “provide yet another layer of reassurance to parents and education staff that schools are as safe as possible”. (1)

The Swiss Federal Council has just proposed free mass testing of its population-based o the success of mass testing in breaking the back of Sars-Cov-2 in Slovakia. (2) and (3). The approach has been long advocated by Professor Michael Mina of Harvard School of Public Health and was even featured by Time Magazine and the New England Journal of Medicine. (4) and (5).

Paul Romer, the economist and policy entrepreneur, who- was the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics Sciences and Professor in Economics at NYU advocated the same and argues that the cost of testing would be less than 0.5% of a lockdown. He has spent his career at the intersection of economics, innovation, technology, and urbanization, working to speed up human progress. (6)

The Rockefeller Foundation long advanced mass rapid testing. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, also known as the CARES Act, allocated US$25 billion for testing. This was passed by the 116^th United States Congress and signed into law by President Trump on March 27, 2020 (7).

Over the last few months, my team and I have been working with the Rockefeller Foundation, Michael Mina, Paul Romer and companies linked to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) of China on a containment strategy. We have also worked with an mobile app that has time sensitive tracking of all test with geo-location capability. The app was developed in with the model of the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom. We believe this will contain the pandemic while we wait for the population is fully vaccinated.

I would like to end with a quote from Professor Annie Sparrow of the Ichan School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York:

“Slovakia, which has used rapid tests to screen two-thirds of its 5.4m population on serial weekends may provide proof of concept that mass testing can work. Whether or not a vaccine soon becomes available, it is easy to imagine how this could be a game changer. With Covid-19 controlled, millions of jobs would return and millions of students could return to school. Stadiums and theatres, churches and mosques, could reopen. Restaurants and pubs would be safe again…and extended lockdowns a thing of the past. We could reopen our societies — and keep them open.”

*This is the personal opinion of the writer and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.