Sin Chew Daily

Today marks the final day of the conditional MCO, with the country entering a new phase of recovery MCO from tomorrow through August 31, as a buffer period ahead of an exit plan. To a certain degree, this will allow Malaysians to lead the lives they used to be familiar with.

Our effort during the past 84 days has paid off quite well, and Malaysia actually outperforms many other countries in the world based on the benchmarks adopted by WHO to evaluate a country's coronavirus outbreak severity.

That said, we need not be excessively euphoric over those uplifting numbers. We are still not completely free from the virus' threat so long as COVID-19 continues to spread in this world and we let up in our effort to fend off the virus.

As such, there is still a very long way ahead of us in battling the coronavirus, and we must ready ourselves for a protracted war.

The outbreak remains rife a full half-year after its onset. Since the number of daily new confirmed cases broke the 50,000-barrier on March 26, for the following 75 days until June 8 the daily numbers have been fluctuating between 80,000 and 150,000, peaking on June 6 with 150,000 new cases reported globally. We therefore cannot claim that the outbreak has taken a breather.

According to Johns Hopkins University statistics, the total number of COVID-19 cases worldwide breached the 7 million mark on June 7, with a cumulative total of 400,000 deaths recorded at 5.7% mortality rate.

If this trends were to go on unchecked, we should see 10 million infections and over a million deaths in two to three months' time.

The 1918 Spanish flu lasted for 35 months, killing 50 million people worldwide. By right with our technology today far more superior than a century ago, we should have taken much shorter time to finish off the pandemic.

Rightly so, but with human mobility vastly improved, coupled with virus mutations, this virus is very hard to contain unless we have the vaccine at hand.

The new vaccine jointly developed by US biotech company Moderna and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is now in phase 3 clinical experimentation. It will take at least another half a year for the vaccine to be made available in the market. Much longer for mass production.

In view of this, we have to continue to strictly adhere to the SOPs over the next one year.

So long as the virus is not fully contained, short-term lockdowns imposed across the world will have far-fetching effects on the global economy.

Recent reports released by IMF and The Economist have produced largely identical conclusions, that the world's economy will contract by 3% next year. Economic loss worldwide will top US$9 trillion and 170 countries are expected to see contractions in their economies. This could very well be a prelude to another Great Depression!

Donald Trump was well aware of the the economic plight and after weighing the pros and cons, the president decided to give up battling the virus already sickening more than two million Americans and killing 110,000 others, and made the hasty decision to take the nation down the road of herd immunity for the sake of its economy.

Compared to the West, Malaysia has done relatively well in containing the virus. However, we may not dodge the ultimate destiny of economic depression of a global scale. All we can do is to minimize the damage.

Malaysia is fortunate we have not been very badly hit, but that is not the end of the story. For the months to come, we not only need to continue fighting the virus but the government must adopt a more systematic approach in striking a balance between virus containment and normalization of economic activities  in the long run.

It is hoped that business operations will be gradually put back on the track during the recovery MCO while the restructuring of economic orders is expedited, so as to stamp the tides of corporate closures and unemployment in mitigating the economic impact from the viral outbreak.