Covid-19 Reverses Declining Streak On Surge In New Cases In Malaysia

KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 29 (Bernama) -- Malaysia’s COVID-19 cases snapped a declining streak this week as new daily infections began to show a gradual uptrend. The lowest daily COVID-19 cases from Oct 23 to Oct 28 were recorded on Oct 25 with 4,782 infections. The last time the daily new cases reached 4,000 was on June 22, with 4,743 infections. The Ministry of Health (MOH) yesterday reported daily cases of 6,377 (including 32 imported cases), bringing the cumulative figure to 2,454,749. A significant uptrend in daily cases was recorded from Oct 25 till yesterday. Following is the daily new cases during the week under review: Oct 23 - 5,828, Oct 24 - 5,666, Oct 25 - 4,782, Oct 26 - 5,726, Oct 27 - 6,148 and Oct 28 - 6,377. New COVID-19 cases increased this week, no thanks to the lifting of interstate travel restrictions on Oct 11. During the week under review, Selangor topped the list with four-digit cases. Following is the breakdown of daily new cases: Oct 23 (1,037), Oct 24 (1,077), Oct 25 (756), Oct 26 (923), Oct 27 (1,213) and Oct 28 (1,414). As of yesterday, MOH reported a total of 6,637 cases, bringing cumulative recovered cases to 2,354,622 (95.9 per cent). According to MOH’s COVIDNOW data as at 11.59 pm yesterday, active cases stood at 71,358 as against 174,492 on Sept 28. With the cumulative figure of 2,454,749 cases, Malaysia now stood at the 20th spot in the list of 223 nations/territories struck by the COVID-19 pandemic. Just ahead of Malaysia is the Philippines (2,772,491) and Ukraine (2,851,804). As of yesterday, 500 patients required treatment at the intensive care unit (ICU) and 207 cases needed respiratory assistance. Another 95 fatalities were registered yesterday, bringing total fatalities due to COVID-19 in the country to 28,769. Meanwhile, of the 6,377 daily new cases reported yesterday, 101 (1.6 per cent) were categories 3, 4 and 5 while 6,276 (98.4 per cent) were categories 1 and 2. According to MOH, category 5 is for critical cases requiring ventilators; category 4 is for patients needing oxygen assistance and category 3 is for patients with pneumonia. Category 1 is for patients who are asymptomatic and category 2 is for those with mild symptoms. The daily R0 or Rt value during the week is still below 1.0. The breakdown is as follows: Oct 23 (0.87), Oct 24 (0.88), Oct 25 (0.89), Oct 26 (0.91), Oct 27 (0.94) and Oct 28 (0.95). As of yesterday, Negeri Sembilan recorded the highest RO/Rt value at 1.04 followed by Kuala Lumpur (0.99) and Melaka (0.98). The R-Naught or R0/Rt value of a virus indicates the infectivity rate or the number of new infections generated by each case. An R0 value of 0.5 would be needed to flatten this deadly virus’ infection curve. On the ‘spike protein COVID-19’ mutation in Malaysia, Health Director-General Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah reported yesterday, a total of 261 new cases were variants of concern (VOC), comprising 259 Delta variant cases (B.1.617.2); and two Beta variant cases (B.1.351). This brings cumulative cases infected by the SARS-CoV-2 categorised as VOC and Variant of Interest (VOI) to 2,645 cases. Of the total cases, 2,625 were VOC and another 20 were VOI. -- BERNAMA