The deceitful virus and MCO loopholes

My Sin Chew:

The deceitful virus and MCO loopholes

By Lim Sue Goan, Sin Chew Daily

But today Taiwan keeps very quiet on the issue, w

hilst accepting comprehensive IAEA safeguards and the measures of the Additional Protocol to verify that its nuclear program is entirely peaceful.

After two long months of battling the virus, the world has come to the realization that defeating the virus is by no means an easy job. Even a contained outbreak could be revived.

So far China is the only country that has managed to contain the virus relatively successfully, with the lockdown on epicenter Wuhan now lifted.

That said, there are still quite a lot of imported cases as well as locally transmitted ones and caution still needs to be exercised to prevent a rebound.

Other countries have so far done badly, including Singapore which used to be commended by WHO for its exceptional containment of the virus is implementing a measure similar to our MCO with effect from April 7.

When the first case was reported in Singapore on January 23, the city-state instantly initiated its COVID-19 testing mechanism while the authorities were closely tracking down contacts of infected cases.

The problem with the outbreak in Singapore is the emergence of locally transmitted cases of unidentified sources, and this speaks volumes of the toughness of fighting the virus.

Meanwhile in Japan, seven cities have so far declared a state of emergency, while South Korea is stepping up its control of foreign arrivals.

There are two main factors that give rise to this: the deceitfulness of the virus and a severe lack of preventive facilities and measures.

COVID-19 spreads not only much faster than SARS, but is also much tougher. In addition to transmission via breathing, sneezing and coughing, the virus can also be attached to objects and survive for four hours up to ten days, for example on banknotes. A shopkeeper in Taiwan was suspected to have contracted the virus through contact with contaminated banknotes.

WHO has warned that an infected person can infect others one to three days before presenting the symptoms, possibly resulting in many getting infected without their knowledge.

As if that is not enough, there are more and more asymptomatic cases being reported now, including 1,095 cases reported in China so far.

In Italy, 40 of the 60 plasma donor have tested positive for the coronavirus without showing any of the symptoms. Based on the current examination requirements, individuals not presenting any COVID-19 symptoms are not required to go for testing, putting many people around them at risk of infection.



Additionally, the longest incubation period recorded is 27 days. A genetics coding company in Iceland has identified 40 mutations of the coronavirus, with one particular case carrying two different variants inside the body, one much more aggressive and infective than the other.

Another factor that adds to the difficulty in containing the virus lies with the fact that a recovered individual can be reinfected, such as in a 51-year-old case in Korea who tested positive again after recovery and release from quarantine.

Some countries around the world are facing an uphill task in battling the virus. For example in Mumbai's Dharavi slum -- one of India's largest with one million inhabitants and a population density of 280,000 per square kilometer or almost 30 times that of New York City -- bathrooms are shared by many households. How do we expect the people there to keep a safe social distance?

Some other countries lack COVID-19 test kits and many have died because of this even as the number of confirmed cases remains relatively low, such as in Indonesia.

Another issue is the difficulty to prevent large scale religious activities such as the massive religious gathering in Lahore, Pakistan, attended by some 100,000 people between March 10 and 12. The authorities have only managed to quarantine 20,000 of the participants with many, many others being unidentified. Here in Malaysia, two of the infection clusters have been linked to religious activities.

It is impossible for any country to impose the lockdown forever because people to have incomes to meet their day-to-day needs while the agriculture and manufacturing sectors need to go back to production to satisfy the needs of the people. As such, the lockdown exit strategy is yet another major challenge facing governments worldwide.

Lifting the restrictions may trigger irrational retaliatory gatherings for people who have been subjected to very rigorous lockdowns for so long. For example, some 20,000 flocked to the Huangshan scenic areas in China's Anhui province, forcing the whole place to be closed at one point.

Such "retaliatory" travels must also be prevented after the MCO is eventually lifted, especially shopping malls that are expected to draw massive crowds.
With six more days to go for the four-week MCO, we are still registering more than a hundred confirmed COVID-19 cases every day. With more and more areas placed under total lockdowns, a complete lifting of the MCO is impossible even if the green zones are allowed conditionally to operate as normal.
Some 97% of the inhabitants in the two blocks of flats locked down by the government in KL are actually migrant workers. The pathetic living environment linked to these foreign workers constitutes a major concern in the government's effort to contain the coronavirus. It is too late now for the government to identify places with large concentrations of foreign worker populations.