Kapitan Tan Yit Sheng
KUCHING (Aug 20): A community leader here opines that the State Disaster Management Committee (SDMC) should do away with the distinction between essential and non-essential sectors, if it decides to impose a lockdown in the city to flatten the curve of Covid-19.
Kapitan Tan Yit Sheng said if a lockdown is to be imposed here, it ought to be a full lockdown, which is to say that all activities must be put to a stop.
“Not only should SDMC stop distinguishing essential from non-essential but the lockdown must be full in the sense that all activities are to stop for at least two weeks,” he told The Borneo Post here yesterday.
Tan said if a total lockdown is enforced, civil servants should be mobilised to distribute food aid to the people here.
“Mobilise your civil servants by getting them to deliver food aid door-to-door. Some of our civil servants are working from home and this is almost equivalent to no work but still getting their pay and allowance.
“During a lockdown, they should be mobilised to deliver food aid to every doorstep to break the chain of Covid-19 infections,” he pointed out.
He suggested that the authorities come up with a schedule to help make sure the delivery of food aid to every household is done in a systematic manner.
He said the schedule should also ensure that no household will be left out.
“For example, a civil servant is assigned 200 households in a residential area. If only one household of the 200 is missed, then it can be considered a slight negligence. But if over 20 households are left out, then it indicates a problem.”
Tan said he will be supportive of imposing a lockdown because it seems to him that cases can be detected everywhere here now.
“You don’t know where the cases are and the virus is everywhere. To me, it’s either a total lockdown or no lockdown,” he added.
He also observed that the majority of Covid-19 cases reported here were fully vaccinated individuals.
In view of this, he wondered if this was because vaccinated persons already had some sort of virus inside their body system and hence they tested positive.
“I am not a medical expert, yet I cannot help but wonder why so many of the vaccinated ones tested positive. Perhaps the medical experts should do a research,” he said.
At the time of writing, the SDMC has not issued a statement on what transpired at its meeting called at 11am.
The meeting is believed to discuss pandemic-related matters including a lockdown here to stop the spread of Covid-19.