Winning the war against COVID-19 in Malaysia: An achievable goal?

The World Health Organization (WHO) has initially categorised COVID-19 infection as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) in late January 2020 and later on declared the outbreak as a pandemic on March 11, 2020. On February 4, 2020 the first Malaysian positive COVID-19 patients was detected. It was estimated through a thorough decision tree technique, cumulatively 22,000 positive patients were expected to be infected nationwide. At the current rate of disease detection, screening yield and clinical capacity in Malaysia, the identification of the positive patients will have to be continuously done until middle of May 2020. In addition, a prediction with the forecasted testing capacity was also conducted. In contrast with the earlier estimation, massive testing causes the number of positive patients to be saturated earlier, by the end of April 2020. Based on the projection, 346, 307 cumulative tests will be conducted with 225,100 cumulative positive cases will be identified. Of the numbers, the cumulative number of patients in care would be 17,631 with 705 cumulative number of admission to intensive care unit and 353 cumulative patients required for ventilator. The cumulative death and cumulative discharge are expected to be 394 and 6008 respectively. Currently, it is challenging for Malaysia to flatten the epidemic curve due to the constraints of healthcare resources. These challenges potentially highlight the need for realistic strategies with regard to the country’s capacity.