Local Government and Housing Minister Masidi Manjun said the state had submitted the proposal as Sabah is still recording a high daily number of new Covid-19 cases.
“We have recommended but the eventual decision will only come from MKN, which is the sole authority to decide whether to extend (the CMCO) … so we wait for their decision,” he said during his daily Covid-19 update today here.
Masidi is the state government’s official spokesman on Covid-19 matters. The statewide CMCO was imposed on Oct 13 and was scheduled to end on Oct 26.
To a question on whether the state had recommended tighter SOPs considering the high cases, Masidi said they will consider each development as it comes their way.
“Obviously the figures are still very high so it is important we take that into consideration.
“We feed the information accordingly to the MKN to make a decision and as you know because it’s the CMCO, it means we can either reduce or add the conditions.”
On Sarawak dishing out a further RM104.84 million assistance under the state’s Bantuan Khas Sarawakku Sayang 4.0 package to help ease the people’s burden in facing the pandemic earlier today, Masidi said Sabah will assess the need from time to time.
“The RM50 million provided by the Sabah government earlier also has not been fully utilised and there is another RM50 million top up from the federal government.
“But this will be taken into account in future,” he said.
He added that, as of today, RM26.7 million of the RM50 million provided by the state government has been used to provide food baskets for 25 districts in Sabah, with an average of RM1 million per district.
He said a total of 77,396 food baskets have been distributed to target groups thus far.
On job losses, Masidi said according to the Employment Outlook report by the Social Security Organisation, the rate of unemployment in Sabah has risen by 42% in the first quarter of this year due to the pandemic.
He said this was a big jump from the 5.8% reported in the whole of last year.
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