By Nur Ashikin Louis
KUCHING, Aug 2: Bintulu MP Dato Sri Tiong King Sing has slammed Health director-general Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah for his failure to contain Covid-19 outbreaks in Selangor and Kuala Lumpur.
He told DayakDaily in an exclusive online interview today that the reason why these two states keep hitting high numbers of Covid-19 cases was because the authorities did not separate the infected from the non-infected.
“When there is a Covid-19 positive patient, he or she must not be allowed to undergo quarantine at home but they should be sent to the Covid-19 Low Risk Treatment and Quarantine Centre (PKRC) immediately. The same applies to their close contacts.
“At the moment, the government has set up PKRCs in certain areas such as stadiums and buildings, but they are not enough. By right, the government should spend more money on increasing or upgrading the quarantine centres.
“If the quarantine centres are not enough, they should transform school halls and event halls into standardised PKRCs,” he said.
He further said that these measures have been implemented in Bintulu which led to the successful decrease in the number of cases and prevention of further outbreaks.
“We never allow Covid-19 patients to stay at home. We will pick them up to isolate them from the public and immediately do mass screening.
“Of course Bintulu also does not have enough space in the hospitals so we have set up quarantine centres in various places. We had 58 hotels to isolate the close contacts and 11 quarantine centres including university facilities as well as private association halls for the positive patients.
“So this is the area that the Ministry of Health (MOH) should look into. Like Selangor at the moment, I know that the cases have reached up to 6,000 cases a daily. Therefore, they need to conduct lockdowns area by area,” he added.
Tiong also mentioned that the Health DG has come up with a lot of strategies which included requesting the Covid-19 Stage 1 and 2 patients to stay at home, assuming that the measure would be able to prevent virus transmission.
“If the whole house has 10 people and eight of them are not infected, once they stay in the same house, it is a guarantee that the whole house would be infected. If everybody stays together, especially when the situation involves elderly people, that would be very dangerous,” he pointed out. – DayakDaily
