Leader

NST Leader: All together now, Malaysia

Covid-19 is running wild. Daily four-digit cases say it all. Something isn't working. Granted, we did a great job in flattening the Covid-19 curve in the first wave. Perhaps even in the second wave.

But what is being done during this third wave isn't containing the coronavirus. By the government's admission, the 4,000 daily cases were projected only to happen in March. It has come two months too early. By the same projection, cases are expected to hit 5,000 by April and 8,000 by May or June. This a national worry.

So worried, a group of medical and non-medical experts have written to Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin to fight the Covid-19 war differently. In response, he has asked the experts to join the Health and Scientific Covid-19 Advisory Group set up to advise the government on how to wage the war against the virus. If nomenclature reveals anything, this group appears to be just "health" and "scientific" experts. We think it should not be so restricted. Economists and businessmen should have their say heard, too. So must communications experts.

A word of advice, though, to these experts. Leave home without the politics. Covid-19 war is a medical battle. Lives are at stake here. Even one life matters. As for the economists and businessmen, do not tilt the balance away from lives to livelihoods. Livelihoods only matter if there are lives. Money before men is inhumanity of the most cruel kind.

We are glad that the government has opted for the public-private partnership. But this should go beyond public and private sector hospitals working together. It must also mean the coming together of the minds of the two "worlds" to advance the cause of the war.

The setting up of the advisory group is a move in this right direction. It can happen in another way, too. Universities, especially those with sophisticated research centres and laboratories, are crying out to be used. The government must explore avenues to use them. If our epidemiologists are right, some local universities are able to do genome sequencing of the virus. Why is this important? Victoria in Australia offers an answer.

Such a sequencing can point out infection-control failures as it happened in late May in a hotel quarantine there. The Guardian, the English daily, quoted Victorian health minister, Jenny Mikakos, on July 4, thus: early genomic sequencing had pointed to a "super spreader" of Covid-19 as a source for many new infections across Melbourne's north and west. If the newspaper is right, Victoria's experience suggests genomic sequencing can help identify "the point or person of transmission". We need such Melbourne moments.

There is one other thing the advisory group can help the government do: add more analysis to numbers dished out at daily media briefings. Are the cases spiking because we are doing more testing? Or the B117 variant is already here and doing its mutant menace? Hard to tell. Transparency will help, too.

Like in a war, the soldiers need to be told about the state of the war — what is being done, where we are going wrong and how we need to change course.

The generals can do all the strategies, but without the soldiers, there will be no war to speak of. There will just be one long, losing battle.

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