Don’t repeat Covid-19 mistakes

“All this has happened before. All this will happen again.” — Battlestar Galactica

AT time of writing, I’m guessing there won’t be a party or politician who will emerge as a clear winner in the Melaka elections. If I’m wrong and there are, congratulations.

I’m more concerned however, that the rakyat are going to emerge as clear losers.

I find myself spending more and more time trying to stay ahead of the curve, and understanding future trends. So much of our future well-being and prosperity depends on whether we will be prepared for what the future will bring.

At the moment, it looks like the future is bringing more Covid-19 cases and deaths.

Looking at the charts, there are two major recent turning points.

In terms of daily new cases, we peaked at around Merdeka (around 20,000 daily new cases), and then started seeing a sharp drop downwards, which continued for about two and a half months.

Around Nov 9, we turned again. Having reached a low of about 5,000 - 6,000 daily cases, the trend since then has been increasing.

The daily deaths peaked around Malaysia Day, at about 400 cases a day. There was a sharp drop, and we’re now around 50-60 deaths a day. The numbers haven’t really started going up yet, but the rate of decrease is starting to slow noticeably – just as the number of daily cases did right before it started going up again.

The trend line for daily deaths tends to follow the same trend as daily new cases, with a few days or weeks lag.

All this has happened before, all this will happen again.

Just like everyone else, I’ve enjoyed things opening up again. I’ve enjoyed being able to meet friends for a meal at a restaurant, walk around in a mall, watch movies, and so on.

At the same time though, I haven’t been able to shake this feeling of impending doom. I keep having this image in my mind of that period during an airplane crash where people are yelling “Brace! Brace! Brace!”

Overall progress in humanity can arguably be said to depend on just one thing: our ability to learn from our mistakes.

No one can forget our past cycle, when we happily reopened everything at the first sign of Covid-19 numbers easing, only to cause the onset of the worst phase of the Covid-19 crisis.

There is absolutely no doubt that vaccination has been a major factor in lowering the number of cases and deaths. But vaccination is not a silver bullet.

If it were, no country in the world would be experiencing resurgences. We need not look far for a taste of the future.

Despite what was probably one of the best early prevention strategies that kept their numbers extremely low for a whole year, our neighbour Singapore is also experiencing a severe upsurge in cases.

I am not enough of an expert to do a detailed comparison or analysis, but I think the upsurge of cases even in advanced countries with robust anti-Covid measures absolutely must be taken as a vital warning sign regarding what can happen here in Malaysia.

In fact, given previous Covid-19 cycles, I think it is no longer a question of ‘what can happen’ or ‘if’, but ‘what will happen’ and ‘when’.

We have already seen that the more things open up, the more cases go up. It is a simple fact of life. In the last cycle, the government adamantly refused for weeks and months to act and pull back some of the rushed policies regarding reopening, all while the situation was getting exponentially worse.

I believe this refusal cost the lives of thousands of Malaysians.

All this has happened before, all this will happen again. If we want to avoid the fate of Singapore and other countries, it is absolutely vital that we start taking preventive measures.

I don’t like living with restrictions any more than the next guy. They’re inconvenient, unpleasant, and have an impact on mental health. But when we take the bigger picture into consideration, we must realise that we are talking about the lives of our loved ones and our fellow Malaysians here.

And honestly, even if we were to take only the angle of self-interested self-preservation, a bit of current inconvenience is well worth the price to avoid major disaster for ourselves later on.

I sincerely believe the failure (or at “best”, slow rate of success) to handle Covid-19 by the last government was a huge factor in its downfall.

We now have a new Prime Minister and a new Health Minister. I think it is not a stretch to say that they will be very actively compared to the previous government in terms of how they handle Covid, and whether they are able to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

Indeed, it may not be a stretch to say that this will be the biggest thing by far that Malaysians will judge this present government on.

There will already be resentment towards politicians on account of the forced Melaka state elections. We can already see an uptick in cases happening at exactly the same time as the campaign period. So, in order for the government to avoid even bigger brickbats later on, it is vital that they start taking preventive measures now, however unpopular they may be. Most importantly, the sooner we implement some restrictions, perhaps the less severe those restrictions will need to be. What we absolutely cannot on any account ever do is bury our heads in the sand like ostriches, and ignorantly simply hope for the best.

Covid-19 simply doesn’t work that way. It has a way of severely punishing those who simply float by nonchalantly and fail to take it seriously enough. It’s already done so to us once.

All this has happened before, and all this will happen again – unless we do something to stop it, and do it now.

Nathaniel Tan misses his Uncle Guan. Twitter: @NatAsasi, Clubhouse: @Nathaniel_Tan, Email: [e-mail]. #BangsaMalaysia #NextGenDemocracy. The views expressed here are solely his own.