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The title of this piece is mortifying. Is meant to be. Malaysia has fallen into a tragic public health pit in the past three months.
As of this writing, we have surpassed China in the number of Covid-19 infections, if you can believe either country. China, with a population close to 1.5 billion, where it all began.
The brutal lockdown that we all endured in March, April and into May was based on the premise of a fictitious concern about the spread and effect of the disease.
At the time, running to the supermarket was a chilling business. The citizens of Malaysia took it seriously.
Doctors, nurses, hospital assistants, Grab drivers, people who work in pharmacies, supermarkets and markets and many others were people with profiles of bravery, defying contagion to keep us well fed and well, just like those who kept the lines open. vital supply systems.
Many of them were not even from our land, but migrant workers forced to endure these dangers in order to support their families abroad.
Interestingly, many of this category of people have been recognized by the UK government on the Queen’s New Years honors list. Could we?
Turning slowly away from that, in the course of that initial lockdown, what kept the Malaysians going were a couple of things.
Tuning in to the daily press conference of the Director General of Health, Dr. Noor Hisham Abdullah. He was the reason for leaving our bunkers.
The information from him at the time was precise and abundant enough to dissect that day and until his next appearance.
Between March and May 2020, she was steadfast in determination and had an elegance and grace around her that only blesses true leaders.
He had the ability, above all, to ensure that those around him were celebrated, instead of him. While that was his trademark, there was no doubt that he was the mastermind behind the task and there was no greater sign of that, than the fact that the ministers brought him to the palace, in this cowardly effort by the government to impose a emergency.
Noor Hisham projected that public health was in command, not a government formed by the quicksand of parliamentary repression.
All we heard from that branch of government was that this immediate bludgeon in life was necessary to allow us to return to normal existence once the scourge was under control.
2.4 billion ringgit, we were reminded quite often, was the daily cost of this. To whom and by whom this cost was paid must, of course, appear later.
Jobs were lost, companies succumbed. One of the pillars of our urban society, the immigrant community, became, unsurprisingly, the victim of that expected squeeze in the economy.
Unfairly, they also became the target of resentment, being identified as the ones being gunned down and the cause of the spread of the disease, while Malaysians lost their jobs.
In other words, it was a millennial lament with the migrant as its target.
Who can forget the wild atmosphere in supermarkets in March, April and May 2020?
A worker pulling out fresh cabbage is close to being mugged by shoppers wearing plastic gloves and masks.
The looks at members of your local community, thinking they were carriers of this deadly virus? Would they pinch the last packet of toilet paper?
Noor Hisham reduced us to that, and with good reason. Science for decades supported that theory.
Malaysian legislation in the form of an infectious disease law provided for this. SARS, MERS, and swine flu had prepared Malaysia in a way that few Western countries could conceive.
We accept the sacrifice for our lives, the lives of our children, and our financial future.
It was worth it. In July, Malaysia was reporting mostly single digit imported cases.
A gloom had risen over the nation, but it was not just the ferocity of the lockdown, with the sight of the surrounding barbed wire communities that brought us there.
It was fundamentally the government’s decision to close our borders before anyone in Europe or North America had even conceived of it.
Anyone who entered had to self-quarantine. As it turned out, of course some of it was done in typical Malaysian style. However, it generally worked.
By early July, the children had returned to schools and businesses were opening cautiously. We were told this would be gradual and while some signs were clear, when it comes to mass mergers, there was more than enough confusion for many companies.
The term ‘SOP’ became part of the vocabulary, with nothing being standard. Yes, we could and should have waited longer, but we came through.
Which brings us to the moment, which requires a pivot to consider two points. The first is to ask what the government actually provided financially, to mitigate the effect of that initial shutdown.
There were salary subsidies of between RM600 and RM1,200 and, more importantly, the moratorium on loan repayment for six months. Unimaginative but useful and we suck it. I mean pain.
In Singapore, they too endured a version of the lockdown, electro-derisively called the “circuit breaker”, but the financial package that Singapore offered was singularly embarrassing for us in Malaysia.
As an example, companies initially received up to 75% wage subsidy, which included foreign workers.
Other critical sectors attracted immediate expressions of support from the government. Singapore Airlines was immediately allocated for 10 billion dollars (40.2 billion ringgit).
Everyone, Singaporeans or foreigners, received care packages with masks and food on a regular basis. This, citizens and residents would have thought, is why we are paying up to 22% of our income in taxes. Our insurance for the bad day.
We do not. While Malaysia’s latest budget may provide RM11.7 billion for the Prime Minister’s Department (and let’s remember it has 35 ministers who are supposed to be doing the real work and have their own budgets) and sadly they have all the natural resources, We have simply been unable to provide any meaningful financial assistance other than the usual culturally unsophisticated brochure or allowing EPF withdrawals.
In other words, our government’s solution was to use its own savings for retirement.
What is surprising about the success of Singapore, Australia and New Zealand has been the combination of financial support and lockdowns.
They say, we shut you down, we pay you, and then in a few weeks, you go back to normal life. That is the maxim.
In Hong Kong and Taiwan, it has also been the use of technology and manufacturing excellence, but in both examples, it has been the exercise of maniacal discipline and the central government money to carry it out.
Back home, as Australia and New Zealand set up packed stadiums to watch international rugby, August brought dark omens to Malaysia.
A seizure of power for political office in Sabah, and its resulting reaction, began a spiral of illness and death.
When Sabah went to the polls, it became clear that the number of cases was increasing there. A simple and effective answer would have been to close borders, but even for us laity it was clear that politics was at stake.
The policy determined the devastation of the infection in Sabah in the heat of a campaign and then its purchase of free passage in airplanes to arrive at the peninsula. With politicians too.
The wish of many Malaysians about all parties involved in this political exercise will not be surprising. Paraphrasing the character Mercutio from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, it can be expressed like this: “A plague on all your houses.”
It was in the course of September, when numbers in Sabah soared and medical care became strained, that a change overtook Noor Hisham.
He had won awards for his work, deservedly, but in September he said something along the lines of “we should not seek to place blame.”
This like the Sabah elections brought waves of disease to the peninsula. Well, I am to blame. He was our guardian of public health. He simply took his first irreversible political step.
It continued until October, as the numbers increased. Any fool who has followed this pandemic since its outbreak earlier in the year could have predicted that. He didn’t need a public health expert.
Grew up. It swelled up. Earlier this week, with cases increasing between 1,000 and 2,300 a day, Noor Hisham finally relented.
He said that hospitals were overwhelmed and if you were positive but asymptomatic, you should quarantine yourself.
This broke the central tenet of his entire approach to public health that he was so proud of in March: if it is positive, he is immediately taken to hospital for treatment and quarantine. It is the white flag.
Imagine that message against what we have been hearing from the government. Nothing, of course, from Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin and little more than statistics from Noor Hisham.
However, as the numbers increase, we have opened up other areas of social life and allowed interstate travel.
It’s welcome as personal freedom, but isn’t it prophetically dangerous? The prime minister, responsibly, at this point surely must have said that we will shut down the country.
Instead, it has been the same silence. One that says we don’t have that second tail on the pigeon, the money to do that. Malaysia. Broke.
Other than that, anecdotal stories in the newspapers have supported a total collapse in our health system: the district health offices in March that were on your doorstep within 24 hours, cannot even answer calls.
For my part, I can say that there are cases of close people who have tested positive. I shudder to think that I may be next.
New Years Eve 2020. We have reached our highest new case count with 2,525. Our testing rate of 88.09 per 1,000 (assessed by the University of Oxford Martin School) pales in comparison to Singapore with a rate of 826 per 1,000.
It means our 2,525 cases on New Year’s Eve are actually substantially higher. Community spread is entrenched. We are transferring and we do not have any strategy or message for Malaysians about what is to come.
As our Singaporean neighbors began their vaccinations two days ago, we are faced with the usual opacity in government procurement and the deployment of the most important vehicle that can rid us of this terrible existence.
Tragically we also face silence about what that strategy is.
Bringing these threads together leads to a foregone conclusion: Political leaders today do not have a strategy for dealing with public health.
They have buried their heads in the sands or have coldly calculated that the sand is where it is best to bury their heads.
In doing so, they have gambled with our lives and the bet is this: that the first batch of vaccines will arrive before our system is flooded.
Why? They are more concerned with politics than the welfare of their people. Of course, this must be based on a calculation that Malays, both rural and urban, are stupid.
How were they in GE 14? Shuffle that deck, I say.
Going back to how the cards have always been dealt in Malaysia, I can end by asking this: who do you think will get the first doses of the vaccine in Malaysia? My imagination doesn’t need to go very far, especially if the damn thing works. – January 1, 2021.
* Gopal Sreenevasan reads The Malaysia Insight.
* This is the opinion of the author or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight.
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