KOTA KINABALU: Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin said that new improvements will be made to how Covid-19 patients can be assessed.
The new improvements will include doing assessment online without having to present themselves at the Covid Assessment Centre (CAC), he said.
By doing it online, congestion at the CAC can be reduced, he said after co-chairing the state CITF meeting with Chief Minister Datuk Seri Hajiji Noor here on Monday.
Khairy was also asked about the high number of brought-in-dead (BID) cases in Klang Valley and Sarawak despite the two areas having high vaccination rates.
He explained that most of the BID cases involved those who were not monitored by the Health Ministry or a medical facility be it public or private.
“Therefore we need to ensure that they are referred to or placed under the care of the Health Ministry or a health facility. This means that if they are still under home quarantine, monitoring can be done and they will conduct and update the self assessment of their health status.
“If they show symptoms, we can intervene and get them to come to hospital. I have asked, in Sabah for example, for community leaders and neighbours to monitor those surrounding them who may have symptoms but have not undergone Covid-19 testing,” he said.
He added, “most BID cases are not under the ministry’s care and did not do testing, but suddenly had an onset of severe Covid-19 (and it) may be too late then. In Sabah, there’s also a challenge as some BID cases are non-citizens who were unwilling to come forward to get help.
“So seek assistance and don’t leave it until it’s too late,” said Khairy.
He also disclosed that the death rate reported daily does not reflect the actual number of Covid-19 fatalities on that day.
“I have the actual deaths by date. The deaths announced daily did not occur within the last 24 hours. There is a huge backlog of death cases reported as we need to confirm if the deaths are really caused by Covid-19,” he said.
On the situation with variants of concern (VOC), Khairy said the majority of VOC cases in Malaysia are from the Delta variant, and genomic surveillance is being carried out to monitor this.
The Health Ministry, MOSTI and Higher Learning Ministry have been given additional budgets to conduct the genomic surveillance, he said.
“If we are not mistaken, the Lambda variant has been reported in the Philippines and this is a matter of concern as the borders between Malaysia, especially Sabah and the Philippine are quite porous. We do not want this variant to reach here, that is why it is important to continue genomic surveillance,” he added.