Speaking to FMT, they warned of a likely return of the highly-restrictive movement control order (MCO) in the face of rising infection rates.
On New Year’s Eve, pictures emerged on social media of large crowds gathered at KLCC and the Bukit Bintang area in Kuala Lumpur despite the cancellation of annual fireworks displays and a government appeal to people to ring in the new year at home or with their families.
Since Christmas, Malaysia has twice broken the national record for daily Covid-19 cases, recording 2,335 on Boxing Day and 2,525 on the final day of 2020.
Azrul Khalib, CEO of the Galen Centre for Health and Social Policy, said observers like him were expecting a “major surge in new cases” because of the holiday celebrations.
He said this might be seen over the next two weeks considering the 14-day incubation period of the virus.
“This will put pressure on the healthcare system, which will put tremendous stress on our capacity to deal with the outbreak.”
He said Malaysians would need to prepare for a long battle with the virus as even the arrival of the vaccine against it, slated for the first quarter of the year, would not mean a quick return to normalcy.
“SOPs will need to continue until sufficient coverage has been achieved,” he said. “It will be a couple of years before the situation returns to pre-Covid-19 conditions.”
Malaysian Medics International chairman Dr Vikkineshwaran Siva Subramaniam said it was a “rather worrying sight to see so many people gathered” but remarked that it was understandable that people felt the need to have some fun after going through a particularly unusual and difficult year.
He said he had previously felt a drastic form of the MCO was unnecessary but now believed it might become unavoidable in the face of rapidly mounting cases.
“The current conditional MCO (CMCO) is not working. I understand the government has concerns about keeping a balance between health and the economy.
“Enforcing the MCO would be like a hefty penalty on our economy. But it has proven useful before and it will work again,” he said.
He urged the government to implement a more standardised protocol for handling the pandemic in the new year, labelling many guidelines used so far as “flimsy” and subject to frequent changes.
“There is only so much the people can do. It’s high time the government step up its game.”
Former health deputy director-general Dr Christopher Lee said that it was understandable for “pandemic fatigue” to set in, but he urged the public to remain cautious as “our case numbers are shooting up with many new clusters and sporadic cases around the country.”
He also cited the threat from the more infectious Covid-19 mutations detected in Britain and South Africa.
“While these strains have yet to be identified here, we can’t assume they won’t reach our shores, making our SOPs all the more important now,” Lee said.
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