KUALA LUMPUR: Health director-general Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah has today cautioned the public against non-compliance of standard operating procedures (SOP) to successfully flatten the pandemic curve.
He said this following the ministry’s latest data which showed an increase in Covid-19 infectivity rate over the past three days.
“We need strong social responsibility and compliance to flatten the curve again,” he wrote on Facebook.
Malaysia’s Covid-19 reproduction number (Rt) rose to 1.0 on March 25, the highest figure this month.
The country had not recorded an Rt value of 1.0 since the start of the month. However, there was a steady increase in the Rt value from 0.94 on March 22 to 0.98 on March 23 and 0.99 on March 24.
The Rt value had previously increased from 0.87 on March 18 to 0.90 on March 19 and remained at 0.94 from March 20 to March 22.
n the data shared on his Facebook, Dr Noor Hisham noted that Labuan had the highest Rt as of March 24 at 1.34, followed by Pahang (1.26), Putrajaya (1.25), Kedah (1.19), Kelantan (1.14), Melaka (1.04), and Sarawak (1.03).
Perlis remains the only state with a value of 0 for its Rt.
The graph shared further showed that should Malaysia’s Rt reach a value of 0.8, which is only possible with total compliance to the SOP, the number of daily cases would see a drop to below 1,000 by the end of May.
However, he said, should the Rt value increase to 1.2, which could happen if the public fail to comply with the SOP, the number of cases could increase to almost 3,000 and over by the end of May.-NST