Sin Chew Daily

How far has the coronavirus spread in this country? We used to be a star performer over a year, and touted as one of the five best countries in containing the virus. Unfortunately we have since backslid and has even become a target of warning along with India, by Indonesia which used to be badly hit by the pandemic.

Indonesia is not jeering at us or gloating over our misery. Indeed, if we look at how we dealt with the virus over the past one year, we have been getting worse and worse.

Our May 9 Mother's Day gift was disheartening, with 26 deaths and 632 infected patients being treated at ICU or needing respirators to sustain their lives. All these numbers were historical highs. Meanwhile, in terms of total tally, we have advanced to position 42, with 1.35% of the country's population infected, far ahead of the Philippines (1.0%) and Indonesia (0.63%).

Perhaps we feel that the situation is very alarming in India, with its healthcare system collapsing and dead bodies strewn everywhere. But the thing is, only around 1.62% of the country's population has been infected. It will be a matter of time we will become like India, and we shouldn't doubt it.

Currently the global mortality rate from COVID-19 stands at 2.08%. While this rate pales compared to other pandemics in human history such as black death, Spanish flu or smallpox or between 20% and 40%, the virus is just as infective as the others.

Firstly, due to the underdeveloped medical care standards at that time, anyone infected with those viruses was almost condemned to death, thus the excessively high mortality rates.

Secondly, talking about infectivity, the coronavirus is not any inferior to the above-mentioned pandemics because back then humanity could not even trace the origins of the viruses and therefore had no way to fend off them. And today, we know about the coronavirus so well and have come up with all sorts of preventive and quarantine measures, along with ICU facilities and vaccines. Even so, the number of infections has shot up to 159 million in only around 500 days, with 3.3 million people killed.

Moreover, there is no end in sight to this pandemic anytime soon!

The coronavirus is not a bacteria. It is lifeless and immobile, but people who roam about freely, saliva droplets, banknotes and indeed any object that has come into contact with an infected individual could be a source of infection. The more mobile we are, the faster and wider will the virus spread in our midst.

We mustn't think that we are safe if we put on a face mask. Saliva droplets from people chanting their prayers in a worshiping house, furniture and utensils at a restaurant, banknotes that change hands in a mall or bazaar, the lift button that we press every day…place that we may think of or may not, the virus is already lurking there, prepared to strike.

Community infections and asymptomatic cases remain our biggest concerns. Health minister Adham Baba believes that community cases have risen because infected individuals have failed to observe their quarantine orders or report their conditions to the health authorities. The government should sternly punish such recalcitrant offenders for helping the virus spread in our community.

On May 9, we added a total of 13 new infection clusters, of which five were community clusters, two from religious places. And on May 5, of the 17 new infection clusters reported, seven were community clusters.

On April 11, 144 people attended a dinner gathering held in compliance with government SOPs at a restaurant in Yong Peng , Johor. When the first confirmed case was discovered five days later, all the dinner participants, their families and close contacts took their own initiative to go for screening while all restaurants in town stopped providing dining-in service, some closing for business temporarily. The last COVID-19 case in Yong Peng was reported on May 1, with a total of 117 infections directly or indirectly linked to that dinner gathering. This shows that a medium-sized gathering could spread to the whole town. We can only break the infection chain if we stay united in battling the virus.

The effort to fight the virus has to start with ourselves. A small town or a neighborhood has its own way of stopping the spread of the virus while the country has its policies. As long as we do our bit in checking the advances of the virus, we can always reclaim the title as one of the world's best performing countries one day.