How would the Pakatan government handle Covid-19?

Yes, if left to Pakatan Harapan, there would be no lockdown and no restriction of movements so that millions of Chinese tourists can enter the country. And now, Pakatan Harapan knows more than the government on how to solve the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.

NO HOLDS BARRED

Raja Petra Kamarudin

The critics say Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin and/or the Perikatan Nasional has failed. Measures to combat the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic have not worked and the progress is far short than what is desired.

Well, yes and no!

In the UK, a country with a population of 67 million, there are 4.41 million Covid-19 cases to date with 127,000 deaths. Malaysia, a country with a population of 32 million, has seen less than 400,000 Covid-19 cases to date with 1,449 deaths.

In that sense Malaysia is far more successful than the UK where, if based on population-to-cases ratio, Malaysia should have seen 2.2 million cases and 65,000 deaths.

In terms of vaccinations, though, Malaysia is far behind the UK. In the UK, 18.9% of the population has been fully vaccinated whereas in Malaysia we are struggling below 2%. And why is that?

First of all how many vaccination centres does Malaysia have? In the UK, even football stadiums, supermarket car parks, and all the clinics have been turned into vaccination centres.

The Pakatan Harapan government said there should be no lockdown or restriction of movements because Malaysia needs two million tourists from China

But then there is also a shortage of health workers (mainly NHS staff). However, 10 million British volunteers are helping out to keep the vaccinations moving, and moving efficiently.

Hence the British do not sit and wait. The British help themselves — and “God helps those who help themselves”, as the saying goes.

Malaysians do not like to volunteer. They will say, “I pay taxes, so it’s the government’s job to do all the work. I will just sit and wait.”

Sure, in the UK we also pay taxes – RM10,000 a year for council tax, 20% VAT on goods and services, 20% income tax, and more. But we do not sit and wait for the government to wipe our backsides just because we pay taxes. We go out and help ourselves by becoming donors and volunteers.

Instead of complaining that the vaccination progress is too slow, why not all the political parties and NGOs start a volunteer program to help get the vaccination program moving faster, like in the UK?

Can we see this happen in Malaysia?

Let us not forget this Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic is something new and the learning curve is slow. The UK, too, has made many mistakes over the last 16 months, which have cost billions in losses plus have cost lives.

I will not go into details, but rest assured lives and billions in public funds have been lost because of the mistakes the government made. But they quickly learned what to do and what not to do, and although these mistakes are still occurring, the situation is improving.

And we also do not know how the UK economy is going to be like post-Covid-19. It looks like for the next few years we are going to suffer from the economic fallout of Covid-19. And electricity, gas, petrol, etc., prices are increasing. Sigh…I do not even know how we are going to survive after this.

If you want 100% efficiency, forget it. The law of “what can go wrong will go wrong” applies, especially when faced with something new that you never faced before.

Instead of saying things are bad in Malaysia, why not ask yourself whether it could have been worse? How do you know the infection rate and deaths would not be double, triple, or more, of what it is today if the government had not been tough about the lockdown and the punishment for breaches?

I remember some people saying: just do what India does. Ignore the problem and let people build up their natural immunity. Today, India is in a bad shape — so the theory of “ignore the problem and it will solve itself” has proven to be false.

Actually, the truth is, people just want to attack Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin and the Perikatan Nasional government (for purely political reasons). But they have no 1MDB issue to use. So they are using the Covid-19 issue.

Was it not Pakatan Harapan that said there should be no lockdown and no restriction of movements because the two million tourists from China is a good source of revenue for the tourism industry?

Yes, if left to Pakatan Harapan, there would be no lockdown and no restriction of movements so that millions of Chinese tourists can enter the country. And now, Pakatan Harapan knows more than the government on how to solve the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.