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GEORGE TOWN: A group of mathematicians said today that they expected the 10,000 active cases of Covid-19 reported yesterday to rise to 15,000 in two weeks.
Medical and mathematical experts from the Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) came to this conclusion after carefully studying the statistics from the health ministry on daily infection numbers.
They said that when the country reached five-digit active cases yesterday, the increase in the number of deaths was imminent and that this development would likely push the healthcare system to the limit.
Speaking to the FMT, USM’s mathematical modeling expert Mohd Hafiz Mohd said that a stricter motion control order (MCO) was urgently needed at access points or red zones to reduce the number of active cases.
He said he and his fellow researchers felt that while a stricter OLS was less likely due to financial concerns, mass testing was the way to go to detect and isolate people without symptoms.
“It is time to implement intervention strategies.
“MCOs need to be better coordinated and communicated if they are not already, especially in the red zones. People must adhere to the rules of quarantine and physical distancing to break the chain of infections.
“The findings of our investigation are not to undermine the efforts of the Ministry of Health and leaders, but simply to urge the authorities to conduct more tests to combat the virus in a more objective manner,” he said.
Hafiz said that with more testing, the country’s Covid-19 numbers may increase, but there would be an improved data set and the predictability of the pandemic could be further improved.
He said this could be exemplified by Singapore’s strategy in the massive tests that led to a high number of daily cases, but proved effective in helping to curb the spread effectively with more data.
USM’s Hafiz, along with fellow mathematicians Noor Atinah Ahmad, Dr. Kamarul Imran Musa (epidemiologist, statistician), and Mohammad Subhi Jamiluddin, had put together a comprehensive warning dossier on the increase in active Covid-19 cases.
On the record, they found that the number of active cases is expected to grow “exponentially” in the next month. They said that if it is not overcome quickly, it would put great stress on the country’s health system.
In their research, the team modeled the future prognosis of Covid-19 cases based on a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered-Death (SIRD) model, a mathematical model used to model infectious diseases, calculated with daily data from the Ministry of Health.
The team said it accurately predicted 14 days in advance that the number of active cases would exceed 10,000 on October 27 or 28.
That number of 10,000 was effectively reached yesterday, as announced by the Ministry of Health, which also reported 801 new cases of Covid-19 yesterday.
The academics said that the exponential growth characteristics they saw in the data led them to extrapolate the number of cases for the next two weeks. They expect the number to rise to 15,000 active cases in the next two weeks.
“Our prediction and forecast are based on existing data. The data may change in the coming days, but the science behind these approaches is formulated to capture persistent trends in the data.
“And the persistent trend that we are seeing in our results is that current control measures are not sufficient to control the spread of infections.”
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