Malaysian lockdown can’t curb Covid-19 spread
“One of the challenges that Muhyiddin in particular faces is that it came to power professing to be a Malay government, and ironically it’s the ethnic Malay community that’s getting the brunt of this movement order because many of them are in much more vulnerable jobs, earning daily wages in many sectors that have been closed off”
Nile Bowie, Asia Times
Confirmed Covid-19 infections have more than doubled in Malaysia since unprecedented nationwide restrictions on movement went into effect on March 18, shuttering non-essential businesses and bringing military patrols onto the nation’s streets.
Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin announced today (March 25) that his government’s Movement Control Order (MCO) would be extended to April 14, two weeks beyond its initial March 31 cut-off date.
Foreign and interstate travel is banned under the order, and people may only leave their homes for essential shopping, which has brought the economy to a near standstill. Police have so far arrested 110 people for flouting the order.
The trend of new coronavirus infections “is expected to continue for a while before new cases begin to subside,” said the premier in a televised address. Malaysia has confirmed 1,796 cases of the disease, the highest number in Southeast Asia, while the death toll stands at 19, second only to Indonesia, where 58 have died.
Infections have soared across the densely-populated region in recent weeks, though the true extent of community transmission is difficult to estimate due to inconsistent rates of testing country-by-country. Malaysia, for one, aims to more than double its daily testing capacity from about 7,000 at present to 16,500 by April.
“We are preparing for the worst scenario, but hope for the best outcomes,” Malaysia’s Health director-general Noor Hisham Abdullah was reported saying. The Muslim-majority country aims to emulate South Korea’s model of rigorously screening both symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals.
Authorities initially measured the public’s compliance with the MCO at around 60%, but that figure has since risen to around 90%. While health experts have lauded those movement restrictions as essential to “flattening the curve” of the lethal viral outbreak, appraisals of Malaysia’s overall handling of the health emergency are mixed.
“Malaysia generally compares quite favorably to a lot of other places,” said Bridget Welsh, an honorary research associate at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Asia Research Institute. “We’ve seen interventions and transparency in the health numbers. We’ve seen an attempt to try to engage multiple facets of this crisis.
“This doesn’t, however, mean that there are not perceptions that things could be better within Malaysia and that the government could be doing a better job,” she said. “There are constant reversals, problems with communication, and there are problems of distrust. Some of those things would have been a factor for any government, including the previous one.”
Muhyiddin’s weeks-old government, however, has “an extra liability”, says Welsh: “They chose to engage in a power grab when the country was in the middle of a pandemic,” a reference to last month’s political turmoil which saw the country’s elected government toppled in what many saw as a parliamentary coup.
