Dr Leena Menghaney, who is Doctors Without Borders or Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) Access Campaign South Asia head, said the focus should be a ban on social gatherings, especially those taking place indoors, to ensure that the infection rate can be reduced.
“The issue of lockdowns is sensitive. It is a hard decision for any government to make. But having an arbitrary lockdown across the country does not really work because it juxtaposes a lot of economic hardship to a lot of people. That is what we saw a lot in India.
“And it would adversely affect those running stalls, surviving on daily wages, though at the same time, it would protect people against infection,” she said during a briefing on India’s Covid-19 crisis and patent waiver for vaccines last night.
With the National Security Council (MKN) set to deliberate on a nationwide lockdown, amid the rapidly worsening Covid-19 crisis in the country, she said rather than calling for a lockdown, the focus should be on social occasions.
“We saw that in India. More must be done to cut down on activities such as weddings, religious activities and other social gatherings.
“We should stop the gatherings indoors and outdoors, strictly,” the public health expert said.
On another note, Leena urged the health authorities in Malaysia to invest in genomic sequencing to detect new strains of all sorts of viruses, besides Covid-19.
She said sequencing can help in the future treatment of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and drug-resistant tuberculosis (D-RTB), which she called “the next big threat”, in the long run.
“Developing countries have often said sequencing is a luxury. But today, sequencing is the response you need to have. This way, you know how a strain of virus is mutating.
“This has been said for years, if not decades. If Malaysia was considering investing to improve its sequencing capacity, it would not only benefit Covid-19 research but also when you face AMR and D-RTB in the future. It would be the best investment you can make today.
“As a public health policymaker, I would not hesitate in allowing the health ministry to invest into capacity building for sequencing,” she said.
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