Ex-MOH head tells us the specifics of how the govt tracks Covid-19 patients

It’s been around three months since the world was caught in an infectious surprise with Covid-19, and a little more than a month since Malaysia’s had its first case of Covid-19, also more commonly known as coronavirus, and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight yet.

Most of the people who have been quarantined are those who have already fallen sick from Covid-19.But the thing is, during the time when you’re still “healthy”, you’re actually kinda spreading the disease around, which is why a lot of companies have set up a 14-day quarantine policy for employees with travel history, and that’s including Cilisos.

But we were curious as to what kind of procedures the government has to find these patients, so we got in touch with former Deputy Health Minister Dr. Lee Boon Chye and Malaysian Medical Association (MMA) president Dr. N Ganabaskaran to clear some things up.

They apparently have a special team to find you

We’re not just saying that. Due to the fact that it’d been classified as a notifiable disease, an individual must report to the authorities if it’s confirmed that they’re a Covid-19 victim.

After that, Dr. Lee told us that the health authorities will interview the patients about the following:

• Where they’d been over the period of symptoms showing up
• Who they’d been in contact with since the symptoms started showing up

“What we mean by interactions is close contact, like shaking hands and talking. We don’t really count casual contacts, like just passing by one another.” – Dr. Lee, in an interview with Cilisos

After interviewing and finding out the patient’s recent whereabouts and everyone they’d been in touch with, Dr. Ganabaskaran informed us that a Rapid Assessment Team and Rapid Response Team will be dispatched to track down these people inform them they’d recently been in close contact with a confirmed Covid-19 patient. However, they won’t go through testing just yet.

Instead, Dr. Ganabaskaran said they’d be put under home quarantine for 14 days under Section 15(1) of Prevention and Control of Infectious Diseases Act 1998. They’re to isolate themselves from everyone within the household, observe self-hygienic practice, and wear masks for as long as possible. A district health officer will still be around to monitor them every day.

“If the person needs to travel and attend an urgent and unavoidable matter, the person needs to inform the district health officer. Otherwise, the person is prohibited from removing their mask if there are visitors and is not allowed to leave the house for leisure.” – Dr. Ganabaskaran, in an interview with Cilisos

Dr. Lee said that it’s only if they show symptoms of Covid-19 that they’re sent to a hospital for testing. And if the test comes out positive, then they’ll be admitted into a hospital ward.

Okay, but how easily can the Covid-19 spread?

You can get Covid-19 simply from touching an ‘infected’ ITEM

Essentially, the virus is spread through respiratory droplets, which means if a Covid-19 patient sneezes or coughs on you, there’s a high chance you’d become the next victim of Covid-19. However, it’s also likely for you to be infected with Covid-19 if you so much as touch a surface or object that a Covid-19 patient’s touched, and then touch your face.

“We advise them to separate personal items from family members, so they won’t share the virus.” – Dr. Lee

And as we’ve mentioned above, if you do end up contracting Covid-19 yourself, the symptoms will show up anywhere between two and 14 days. Because of the common symptoms, it can sometimes be hard to detect Covid-19 at all. Dr. Lee told us that, in Malaysia, doctors usually do cheek swabs to test whether an individual’s gotten Covid-19.

But different countries have different ways to test for the Covid-19 virus. The US’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has its own diagnostic test kit, but recently, it’s been coming under a lot of fire for failing to produce conclusive results. In China, where the virus allegedly came from, they test for Covid-19 using Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) technique.

And Dr. Ganabaskaran told us that Malaysia’s been pretty effective in testing Covid-19 virus using the same method as China. Essentially, the RT-PCR tests can detect the virus via blood or respiratory tract samples, the latter of which can be taken from the nose or throat – therefore, cheek swabs. And the results are usually available within 24 hours upon testing.

However, not everyone can be tested for the illness, as patients have to be marked as a “suspected case” beforehand.

“They must fulfill the epidemiological criteria of having traveled to one of the countries listed in the MOH guidelines or have had close contact with someone confirmed with Covid-19. The countries listed at the moment are China – including Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan – South Korea, Japan, Italy, and Iran.” – Dr. Ganabaskaran

And if tested positive, a patient can be admitted into a hospital ward free of charge. For now though, there’s no treatment or vaccine for Covid-19 yet, but Thailand and China have been looking into developing effective Covid-19 treatments as the virus has thus far spread across every continent except Antarctica. In addition, there’s currently a clinical trial ongoing in the US to treat the virus.

For those suspected, the best thing would be to do what many people in Malaysia are already doing, which is to self quarantine… Speaking of which…

Wong Chen put himself under quarantine due to a Malaysiakini report

The thing about Covid-19 is that its early symptoms are not all that different from a mild cold or flu, which are high body temperature, cough, and shortness of breath or breathing difficulty. In the end, these would all lead to severe pneumonia. They can take anywhere between two and 14 days after exposure to show up.

However, Wong Chen, MP for Subang told CILISOS wasn’t going to leave things up to chances. He apparently wasn’t aware that he could be exposed to Covid-19 until his wife asked him about it. She was concerned after reading a Malaysiakini report that reported that a former minister and deputy minister had been in close contact with the 26th confirmed Covid-19 patient in Malaysia. It’s reported that the 26th victim is a Khazanah Nasional employee and he has a record of traveling to Shanghai in mid-January.

And apparently, Wong himself had talked and shook hands with the former deputy minister, so he himself got concerned.

“Obviously, I made some calls to find out what’s going on, then I found out he was going for a test to be safe.” – Wong, in an interview with Cilisos

After finding that out, he’d immediately placed himself under quarantine, though it’s not yet confirmed whether he or the former ministers did get infected by Covid-19, out of a sense of responsibility to his family. Some of the precautions he took was avoiding close contact with his family, wiping downs the things he’d touched, and…spending seven hours in the garden under the sun.

“Now I’m isolated in the office in my house, because I couldn’t take the heat anymore. I was planning on sleeping on the balcony tonight with the mosquito nets and all, since I couldn’t sleep with my wife.” – Wong

Fortunately though, just moments after the interview with Cilisos, the Health Ministry had cleared the former minister and deputy minister of Covid-19 infection. And Wong subsequently ended his self-quarantine, where he no longer had to sleep out on the balcony.

So far, since the Covid-19 outbreak reached Malaysia, 20 patients have successfully recovered, but that was last week, and, apparently…

The World Health Organization says we’re doing pretty okay

When compared with other countries, we’re doing pretty okay. For example, China now has 80,428 confirmed cases, South Korea 5,621, and Italy 3,089. So given that some countries are already in the thousands, there’s comfort to be taken in the fact that Malaysia’s still staying within the double digit arena. So far, Covid-19’s infected 95,124 people across the world and taken 3,524 lives, but none in Malaysia has lost their life to Covid-19 just yet.

Not only that, the government has done all it could to contain the virus, like:

• Stopping from issuing visas to Chinese travelers
• Organizing an Emergency Response Team (ERT)
• Monitoring all main entry points in Malaysia
• Setting up a Health Quarantine Center in KLIA.

We’re apparently so prepared that even the World Health Organization (WHO) itself had commended us for our ability to address the Covid-19 virus effectively. In addition, since the outbreak, a total of 20 Covid-19 patients had successfully recovered thus far.

“We (WHO and the public) can see all the information, and the information is immediately out on social media and the Health Ministry website, so I think they are doing very well.” – WHO representative Dr. Lo Ying-Ru, as quoted by NST

However, despite all the efforts that the government’s made to contain the Covid-19 virus…

We’re apparently facing a second wave of Covid-19 cases now

See, even though we’ve seen patients successfully recovering, we’ve also seen a significant rise in the number of Covid-19 cases. At the time of writing, Malaysia’s recorded a total of 55 confirmed Covid-19 cases, where it seems there’s a new victim everyday.

The Health Ministry said that, apparently, a lot of these new cases could be traced back to the Khazanah employee, who’d attended a number of activities after he came back from Shanghai. And well, it seems he also has had a lot of close contacts since.

“Based on investigation and contact tracing carried out to now, 215 close contacts were identified. Of this, 16 cases were found to be positive for Covid-19, 19 negative and180 others awaiting results.” – Health director-general Dr. Noor Hisham Abdullah, as quoted by Malaysiakini

Recently, Dr. Noor Hisham had also announced that they’ve been alerted to the presence of two strains of Covid-19, where a more aggressive type of the virus had affected 70% of victims and a less aggressive type has affected the rest, but the Health Ministry’s still looking into it to find out.

So until health professionals can come up with a way to cure Covid-19 patients and learn more about the virus, all we can do is wait and be careful. Wash your hands, wear your mask, and uh…avoid travelling if you can. If you’re in any way confused about the Covid-19 status here, you can also reach out to the Crisis Preparedness and Response Center (PRC) for more information.