Covid-19: Hit with 'triple whammy', no end in sight - Kit Siang

Citing yesterday’s drastic Covid-19 statistics, Iskandar Puteri MP Lim Kit Siang said the country has been hit with a “triple whammy” in its fight against Covid-19.

The “triple whammy” Lim described was in the daily Covid-19 cases which reached a new high with over 20,000 reported, the breach of the 10,000-mark for Covid-19 deaths, and the cumulative cases now over 1.2 million.

Lim noted that it initially took Malaysia 10 months to reach the first 19,267 Covid-19 cases last October.

“The country must refocus to gain control of the worsening Covid-19 situation, and this can only be done if three conditions are met,” Lim said in a statement today.

The conditions include an end to the constitutional crisis, a new policy to replace the National Recovery Plan (NRP), and restoring public trust through a new “living with Covid-19” based policy in the war against the pandemic.

The DAP veteran stressed that Parliament, in particular, has a major role to draft this new policy and strategy moving forward.

“How can the (Prime Minister) Muhyiddin (Yassin) policy and strategy be ‘whole-of-society’ when it could not even be ‘whole-of-Parliament’?” he added.

Lim’s statement came after Malaysia saw Covid-19 numbers hit record highs for the second time this week.

On Wednesday, the country was said to have broken six records in the history of the Covid-19 pandemic in Malaysia, which includes the most daily Covid-19 deaths.

Yesterday, Finance Minister Tengku Zafrul Abdul Aziz said that the number of new Covid-19 cases with serious symptoms will be used as a new indicator for the transition into Phase 3 and 4 of the NRP.

He added that this would replace the Covid-19 new cases indicator, using as proxy new hospital admission cases for Covid-19 adapted for Category 3, 4 and 5.

Lim said the country needs a National Recovery Council to control the pandemic and spearhead economic and national recovery but it should not be tied to an NRP.

"(This is as the NRP) had not been able to get off the ground at the end of June and compelled decision-makers to rely on a state-by-state transition instead of a national transition,” the DAP stalwart added.

Yesterday, the country reported 20,596 new daily cases, with the cumulative total of cases at 1,203,706.

There were also 164 deaths which pushed the death toll past the 10,000-mark.