Numbers don’t matter anymore, serious cases do, say experts

PETALING JAYA: Public perception of Covid-19 baseline cases will have to change in view of the country’s rising infectivity rate (Rt), says a Universiti Malaya expert.

“A total of 40,000 daily cases may now be the ‘new’ 10,000 daily cases of last year,” said professor of epidemiology and public health Dr Sanjay Rampal.

“We need to re-calibrate our perception and interpretation of the number of daily infections.”

He attributed this to the Omicron variant, which is likely to cause a higher baseline level.

With good public health measures, he said the number of daily cases might hover around 8,000 to 10,000 cases a day.

“However, we are likely to experience periods of large outbreaks in the coming months with daily numbers increasing to above 50,000 cases a day,” he cautioned.

Dr Rampal said the healthcare system should be able to deal with the situation in view of Omicron causing a less severe impact on the vaccinated population, unlike the previous Delta surge.

The rate, which indicates the average number of people who may catch the virus from an infectious person, has been going up of late.

It was 1.20 on Saturday, 1.27 (Sunday), 1.32 (Monday) and 1.39 (Tuesday and yesterday).

A value of 1.4 means that 100 people will spread the disease to 140 people. An Rt of below one means the infection is not spreading.

Universiti Malaya Department of Social and Preventive Medicine Faculty of Medicine’s Prof Dr Moy Foong Ming said people may not need to be too worried with the daily number of cases, as fully vaccinated people may have mild symptoms.

“Instead, we should monitor the number of severe cases that require hospitalisation or deaths,” she said.

She acknowledged that vaccines could not fully prevent the transmission of Covid-19, but were very effective in preventing severe symptoms and deaths.

Attention should also be given to the elderly and high-risk groups who may get severe symptoms when they are infected, she added.

Universiti Putra Malaysia epidemiologist Assoc Prof Dr Malina Osman said the high numbers were expected in view of the Omicron variant.

“However, the situation now is different from what we were facing with the Delta variant,” she noted.

“With Delta, we had a high number of people in the intensive care unit, higher admissions, fatalities, and cases of brought in deaths.”

Right now, she said, the most vulnerable groups were unvaccinated children and those who had not completed their vaccination or booster shots, especially if they had comorbidities.