Members of the public queuing up to get tested for Covid-19 at one of the counters set up outside Lanang health clinic building in Sibu. – File picture
SIBU (Feb 9): The Pasai Cluster should be the subject of a research to better deal with Covid-19 outbreaks in longhouses in the future, Sarawak General Hospital senior consultant paediatrician Dr Ooi Mong How proposed.
During a discussion on the pandemic live on Facebook, he said the government ought to learn from the cluster so that such an outbreak would not happen again.
“This Covid-19 will not go away so quickly, it will be here for another two or three years. Pasai Cluster will not be the last, it is the first (of such a severe outbreak), but certainly will not be the last.
“We need to have a proper research into this and understand the whole environment of the cluster, so that next time, if a longhouse is exposed, we would know how to deal with it effectively and we will not allow it to become so big,” he said.
Sibu Municipal Council (SMC) chairman Clarence Ting, who hosted the discussion, had asked why the Pasai Cluster was so severe compared to other clusters .
The Pasai Cluster, which started in several longhouses in Sibu, was declared by the State Health Department on Jan 9 after 38 positive cases were detected from the cluster including its index case who was found positive on Jan 7.
The Sarawak Disaster Management Committee (SDMC) yesterday said the Pasai Cluster, has so far recorded a total of 2,363 cases throughout the state.
As of yesterday, Sibu has contributed 2,041 cases to the state tally of 5,760.
Dr Ooi also said that it was not difficult to imagine why Pasai Cluster cases had spread very fast due to the environment and lifestyle in the longhouse.
“Every longhouse consists of one single house with many ‘bilik’ or ‘pintu’. The way of life in the longhouse especially at night or weekend, folks usually sit together at ruai and interact with one another. Relatives also live in the same house.
“We in Sarawak, we are friendly people, we like to interact. I think that communal spirit and lifestyle also contributed to this,” he said.
He also said that the fourth wave of Covid-19 outbreak was challenging as it involved both rural areas and spread back to town areas.
He said most rural folk especially the longhouse folk work in town and would go back to their longhouses every weekend.
Dr Ooi, however, believed that Sarawak was still very much in the containment stage and the state could overcome the outbreak if everybody played their parts together.
He also said that Sibu could learn a lot from the third wave outbreak involving the Greenhill Cluster in Kuching in the effort to bring the cases down.
According to him, when Greenhill Cluster was detected, a lot of cases involved friends and relatives. Subsequently, these close contacts then contacted their own friends and relatives.
“So, a lot of people actually did not wait for the contact tracer to contact them, they were getting involved themselves. This is the key element for us to control and bring the cases down,” Dr Ooi said, adding that Haji Baki Cluster was also another success story.
He pointed out that each cluster outbreak in Kuching starting from the first outbreak last year usually lasted for a few months before it could be controlled completely.
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