KUALA LUMPUR: The daily number of patients who recovered from Covid-19 in Malaysia has continued to outpace new cases as 18,074 recoveries were reported today compared to 13,899 new infections, said Health director-general Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah (pix).
He said this brings the cumulative figure for recoveries to 1,968,541 since the pandemic broke out early last year.
He said of the 13,899 new cases reported today, 211 cases or 1.5 per cent were in categories three, four and five while 13,688 cases or 98.5 per cent were in categories one and two involving asymptomatic and mild cases.
Apart from this, he said, there were 1,071 patients being treated in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) comprising 847 confirmed Covid-19 cases and 224 cases which are suspected, probable and under investigation.
“A total of 601 cases require respiratory aid involving 359 positive cases while 242 are suspected, probable and under investigation cases,” he said in a statement.
Dr Noor Hisham said 12 new clusters were detected today, with five at workplaces, three involving high-risk groups, two in the community and one each linked to education and religious bodies.
He said Malaysia’s Covid-19 infectivity rate (R-Naught) was 0.90, with Pahang registering the highest rate among states at 1.01 while Labuan was the only state with a zero R-Naught value.
Meanwhile, he said six local studies on Covid-19 spike protein mutation detected 475 variants of concern (VOC) between Sept 13 and today, involving 472 Delta variants and three Beta variants.
They were identified through sustained studies by the Institute of Health and Community Medicine (IHCM-UNIMAS), Malaysia Genome Institute (MGI), Integrative Pharmacogenomics Institute (iPROMISE-UiTM), Institute for Medical Research (IMR), UKM Medical Molecular Biology Institute (UMBI-UKM) and Tropical Infectious Diseases Research & Education Centre (TIDREC-UM)
Dr Noor Hisham said this brings the cumulative cases categorised as VOC and variants of interest (VOI) to 1,860 cases today, with 1,840 cases being VOC and 20 being VOI.
“Overall, so far for VOC there are 1,612 cases of Delta variant, 214 cases of Beta variant and 14 cases of Alpha variant. For VOI, there are 13 cases of Theta variant, four cases of Kappa variant and three cases of Eta variant,” he added.
He said data on deaths and other data on the current situation of COVID-19 infections in Malaysia would be uploaded on the GitHub and https://covidnow.moh.gov.my websites.- Bernama
