Malaysia: From COVID role model to a mini India

Underwritten by Tristan James Jr.

The horrific and heartbreaking scenes at Malaysian hospitals are akin to a disaster movie. An overwhelmed healthcare system and overworked medical staff have struggled to cope with the exponential growth in COVID-19 admissions.

Canvas beds have been put up in hospital car parks, several patients have had to share the same oxygen canister, and some life-saving procedures had to be performed on hospital floors. Doctors have reported that whole families have been admitted together to hospitals and some have died together.

“Now, I just have no emotions, it is what it is … death has become so frequent that you become numb,”

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To keep up with the rising death counts, bodies have had to be stacked up on trolleys and pushed to the morgues. Volunteer undertakers have been handling nearly 30 times more bodies than they did last year.

Malaysia’s biggest COVID-19 fear was becoming a mini-India and unfortunately, it has come true. Its daily infection and death counts per capita surpassed India’s peak. At the end of July, Malaysia’s daily cases per million people stood at 515.9 and its daily deaths per million were at 4.95; by contrast, at its peak, India reached 283.50 cases and 3.04 deaths. The country also has the highest per-million cases in Asia, and one of the highest per-million deaths in Southeast Asia.

“This is a dramatic reversal of fortunes for a country once deemed the role model in handling the pandemic”

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Malaysia celebrated as local transmissions reached zero for a few days, garnering praise from foreign experts, academics, and organisations such as the World Health Organization. The Malaysian government’s swift actions to implement a full-scale lockdown, invest in testing and medical facilities, and deploy proactive communication with the public resulted in fewer cases than in the rest of Southeast Asia.

Malaysia’s director-general of health, Dr Noor Hisham, was given the highest civilian honour and was named alongside the US’s Dr Anthony Fauci and New Zealand’s Ashley Bloomfield as the top health officials in the battle against COVID19.