She also said that there were opportunities to optimise the MySejahtera app for better contact tracing.

The former Mercy Malaysia president said good digital tools are needed to help monitor these patients under home quarantine.

“We also need to provide a proper assessment of each patient because not everyone is suited to undergo this home quarantine system which the ministry is doing,” she said at an online conference organised by the Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs today on lessons learnt from the pandemic.

Jemilah, who is also the prime minister’s advisor on public health, was speaking in her capacity as a health professional who had been observing the management of the pandemic globally.

“It should have been started when the number of cases was much lower. We are late in doing this.”

Jemilah said the dichotomy between public and private healthcare at present should be corrected to handle the pandemic.

She believed the government should have decanted non-Covid-19 patients to private facilities so that the public hospitals could focus on treating Covid-19 patients.

“My personal view is that Covid-19 patients should have not been managed by private hospitals, they are the second line of defence,” she said.

On the use of the MySejahtera app to automate contact tracing, Jemilah said there was concern that the government would breach users’ data privacy.

“There was controversy and a huge outcry from netizens that MySejahtera might steal their data. Here is the thing: do we protect privacy or do we protect lives? We need to re-examine that.

“Let’s be honest, we live in a state of deep mistrust in Malaysia and that mistrust makes it harder to implement contact tracing,” she said.