Senator Liew Chin Tong said the second round of movement control order restrictions could have been avoided if screening capacity had been increased in April 2020, in the early days of the national lockdown last year.

The current MCO lockdown could have been avoided if testing capacity was ramped up and massive testing constantly conducted throughout the whole period of the MCO from March 18 last year, he said in a statement.

“It is now time for the prime minister to treat testing as the No 1 defensive mechanism in our ‘war’ against Covid-19,” he said.

He urged Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin to be transparent about the government’s plan to increase the country’s testing capacity.

Liew also questioned the government’s reluctance to increase the use of rapid test kits in order to reach the target of 150,000 to 200,000 tests a day.

“While the health director-general says the ministry is not against the use of rapid tests, there is no sign that the government is ramping up rapid tests to the necessary level,” said Liew, who is a DAP policy strategist.

Although rapid test kits were less accurate than the molecular RT-PCR testing method, he said the rapid test kits could be deployed in prisons, localities with clusters and for close contacts who were asymptomatic.

Liew urged the government to adopt a “whole of government” approach through the National Security Council instead of the current health ministry-dominated approach against the pandemic.

However he was critical of senior minister for security, Ismail Sabri Yaakob. “Somehow, (Ismail) only announces SOPs and how many people were arrested, without injecting much overall strategic thinking”.

Health director-general Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said recently that testing capacity at the ministry’s laboratories had reached maximum capacity. He urged private laboratories, and those at university and military hospitals to increase their capacity.

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