MALAYSIA has likely seen the peak of Covid-19 infections last week, with the daily number of recoveries now exceeding new cases, said Director-General of Health, Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah.

“Data has shown that last week was perhaps our peak. We are seeing less and less new cases,” Dr Noor Hisham said in Putrajaya today.

“Before the MCO (movement control order) was implemented, we calculated our infectivity, the R0, at 3.55. Now when we look at the data today, we have managed to bring down the R0 to 1. We hope by April 15, we can reduce it to 0.9.”

The R0, pronounced R-naught, is a mathematical term that indicates the average number of people who will be infected by a disease from one contagious person.  

A total of 118 new Covid-19 cases were reported over the last 24 hours, bringing the tally to 4,346, while 222 patients were discharged in the same period, taking the total number of recoveries to 1,830.

This is the third day in a row the number of patients discharged have exceeded the number of new cases. Three deaths were also reported today, taking the toll to 70.

Dr Noor Hisham said he was on of the Health Ministry team that had advised Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin to extend the MCO, which has now been prolonged to April 28.

“What we advised the PM was to extend the MCO for two weeks to give us more time to carry out our activities and make sure we can contain and break the chain of infections. We need to bring down the R0 to below 0.9.”  

He noted that analysts from JP Morgan and the Malaysian Institute of Economic Research had projected an exponential rise in cases by mid-April, but said those projections can be beaten.

“They based their projections on assumptions, but our analysis is based on reality. We are using daily data and keying it in as accurately as possible.

“Our predictions show that the trend is quite stable at the moment and we have not seen any exponential surge,” Dr Noor Hisham said.

He said data showed that the MCO has so far slowed down the rate of infection to levels similar to trajectories projected by the Health Ministry’s research team.

The extended MCO would serve as a “middle stage” to break the incubation period while the government will take a targeted approach with certain groups.

He cited World Health Organisation director-general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who had warned against ending efforts to restrict movements too early at the risk of a resurgence.

“Should that happen, more people will continue to be infected; the elderly and other high risk groups will be in danger while the health system may not have the capacity to cope with a rise in cases that could be more than what we are experiencing .” – April 10, 2020.