The post-lockdown relapses in many Western countries should serve as a constant reminder that we need to continually be on high alert.

April 1, the country officially transitioned to the endemic phase of Covid-19, with our borders reopened and houses of worship SOPs remarkably relaxed. Ramadan bazaars are now packed with evening shoppers while Chinese Malaysians visit the tombs of their ancestors for the first time in three years for the annual Cheng Meng tomb-sweeping festival.

Pictures of packed public venues posted on newspapers and social media are downright frightening. Let’s keep our fingers crossed this is not going to be the source of the next major outburst of cases.

Any reopening is invariably accompanied with unpredictable risks!

April 13 last year, then defence minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob announced the extension of the operating hours of bazaars, F&B outlets and food delivery services to six in the morning (from twelve midnight) in conjunction with the Muslim fasting month, so that Muslims could buy food before they started the day’s fasting.

No thanks to such relaxation of rules, the coronavirus started to spread like wild fire after May. It is difficult not to associate the massive crowds at Ramadan bazaars to the rapid spread of the virus. But as the decision on Ramadan bazaars was a collective one, we could not single out any individual to take the blame.

Reopening our national borders and transitioning to the endemic phase are absolutely necessary to salvage the anaemic economy and keep individual businesses afloat on the back of high vaccination rate and low mortality rate. We support the government’s decision and believe they have cautiously weighed the pros and cons of reopening.

We must nevertheless come to terms with the fact that the virus will not vanish or weaken overnight just because we have now transitioned to the endemic phase.

At this very moment, our daily new infection numbers continue to stay above 10k, with dozens of people killed each day.

In view of this, health minister Khairy Jamaluddin and health DG Noor Hisham Abdullah continue to urge Malaysians to strictly abide by the antivirus protocols, put on face masks, diligently sanitise their hands and keep safe social distances.

The cumulative number of confirmed cases has now topped 4.26 million, but as up to 95% of positive cases are asymptomatic, the actual number of carriers could have been more than 20% of the total population, and we are not trying to sound alarmist here!

Elsewhere in the world, the cumulative number of confirmed cases in the US is 25% of the population, 31.6% in the UK, 39.7% in France, 27.1% in South Korea, 19.5% in Singapore and 15.7% in Hong Kong. As such, it is highly likely that our 12.9% infection rate could have been grossly underestimated!

Meanwhile in China, touted by many as a role model in the global war against the virus over the past two years with only approximately 150,000 reported cases, saw a massive surge of 13,100 new cases on one day alone last Saturday. As if that’s not enough, the new BA.1.1 sublineage of the Omicron variant was even discovered in Suzhou, and we have no idea whether the new strain will be more powerful and resistant to existing vaccines.

Statistically, full reopening is almost proportionate to rapid transmission of the virus. The UK was the first in the world to lift all antivirus bans on July 19 last year. From 5.4 million cumulative infections reported back then, the number has since swollen many times over to 21.2 million barely eight and a half months later.

Seeing no end to the pandemic despite the lockdown measures, the Scandinavians announced full reopening on Feb 12 this year. In Norway, 400,000 new cases have been added to the 1.01 million cases reported up to the reopening, with 2,518 cumulative deaths, up 66.4% from the 1,513 recorded merely 50 days earlier.

What happens in Norway today should serve as a reminder to Malaysians that the virus will stage a powerful comeback anytime if we let our guard down.

The Spanish flu a century ago started in January 1918, and by the time the pandemic was declared over in April 1920, some 500 million people had been infected globally in two years and four months. An estimated 20 to 50 million people were killed by the virus.

Indeed, Covid-19 has wreaked havoc on the planet also for two years and four months by now, with 491 million infections and 6.18 million deaths reported. If not because of the vaccines we have developed, this pandemic could have been much worse than the Spanish flu because we still don’t see an end to the pandemic this time!

For the sake of the national economy and survival of local businesses, we have no choice but to loosen the screws and open up our doors once again.

Transitioning to endemic phase doesn’t mean the virus has vanished. The post-lockdown relapses in many Western countries should serve as a constant reminder that we need to continually be on high alert.