He said this was based on the fact that vaccinations in Labuan and Sarawak had managed to reduce hospital admissions, intensive care unit (ICU) bed usage and use of ventilators for Covid-19 patients.
Noor Hisham expressed confidence that cases in the Klang Valley would also drop once 50% of its population had been vaccinated by Aug 31.
“We are already seeing some positive results in the Klang Valley.
“When we started vaccination for the elderly (those aged 60 and above), the number of patients at Sungai Buloh Hospital decreased.
“Now, we are seeing those aged 40 to 59 and 20 to 39 also decreasing in number over the last one week,” he said.
He said this during a question-and-answer session after delivering his keynote address and attending a dialogue at the Malaysia Healthcare Conference 2021 held virtually today.
He noted that from the 67 whole genome sequencing done to identify variants of concern (VOC) in the country from July 17 until this month, 66 were confirmed to be the Delta variant.
He said the Delta variant had a higher infectivity rate or R-nought value and thus was much more transmissible compared to the Wuhan virus which sparked the pandemic last year.
“The R-nought for the Wuhan virus started from 2.5, which means one person can infect 2.5 people but now this virus (Delta) was reported at five to eight, which means if 100 people get infected, they infect 500 to 800 people in one cycle.
“This is similar to chicken pox (11 to 12) and measles (18),” he added.
He also said more variants are expected to emerge, adding that mutations happen when there are infections that cause the virus to enter and multiply in the lungs.
“Maybe in another three or four more cycles, we will see spike protein mutations that are resistant to our vaccines, and we may not be able to detect them from our testing.
“The fear is there, but we need to look into solutions, how best to contain this infection in our country,” he added.
Commenting on Ivermectin, Noor Hisham said the results of clinical trials on the use and efficacy of Ivermectin would be available by next month.
He said the vitro study (experiment done in the laboratory) is showing some results, but the vivo study (experiment on living organisms) showed a high dosage of Ivermectin was needed to achieve anti-viral effects but this could give rise to some other complications.
He also said the health ministry would conduct a study on three types of drugs to treat Covid-19 patients, as announced by the World Health Organization — artesunate, imatinib and infliximab.
He said solidarity tests on drugs used in the past such as Remdesivir, Hydroxychloroquine and Lopinavir showed that they were not effective against Covid-19.
He also said 190 homeless people had been fully vaccinated in the first phase of “Vaksinasi Covid-19 Gelandangan@WPKL” in Kuala Lumpur, and 133 people in the second phase.