KUCHING, Sept 19: Sarawakians should focus on hospital admission, Intensive Care Unit (ICU) bed utilisation, numbers of patients on ventilation and deaths instead of number of new daily infections when reading the statistics of State Covid-19 in post vaccination era.
State Local Government and Housing Minister Dato Sri Dr Sim Kui Hian said the authorities need everyone’s cooperation to come forward to be vaccinated.
He was referring to the remaining eligible individuals above 18-years-old who have yet to receive the Covid-19 vaccines.
H also called on the newly eligible group of those aged 12 to 17 to come forward for vaccination.
“On Sept 12, Sarawak had the single-day highest record of 5,291 cases while Sabah had 1,717 cases and (is) still catching up with vaccination.
“Despite recording (a) high number of cases, Sarawak had 99 per cent or 5,288 cases in Category 1 (no symptom) and Category 2 (mild symptom), and most of these cases will recover.
“Unfortunately on the same day, Sarawak registered eight deaths while Sabah registered 84.
“Thus, our focus in post-vaccination era (despite Delta variant) should not be on the number of daily new cases anymore but on hospital admission, ICU beds, numbers on ventilation and deaths,” he said in a Facebook post today.
Dr Sim also commended Australia for its vaccination efforts as the latter’s federal government has has left policy and supply of vaccines to individual States and let their respective state health authorities to run their respective rollouts.
“Interesting to note that Federation of Australia with every State having its own ‘department’ but functions like a Ministry where it is not answerable to Canberra as they (personnel) are State employees and not federal civil servants, (and) have their own full authority in health, education, transport, police force and State judicial.
“While in Sarawak, our State health, State education, State police, State judiciary are part of federal government civil services,” he added.
Based on a weekly infographic from the New South Wales government in Australia on its Covid-19 situation, Dr Sim noted that Sarawak has a higher vaccination rate.
However, what’s important is that observations in both Sarawak and Australia conclude that vaccinations have resulted in decreased case severity as well as decreased deaths, ICU admissions and number of patients requiring ventilation.
By October this year, Sarawak expects to be entrusted by the National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme (Pick) to administer different priority groups with booster doses or third dose of Covid-19 vaccines.
The top priority group in the queue involves medical frontliners. — DayakDaily
