Urgent need for more testing now

Photo: AZHAR MAHFOF/The Star

WE would like to bring readers’ attention to a recent report by a local news portal predicting that 10,000 active cases will occur by Nov 4. The number of active cases already passed 10,000 on Oct 28 (according to the Health Ministry’s Covid-19 portal). Our Covid-19 modelling group, which consists of several applied mathematicians, epidemiologists, public health specialists and a biostatistician, all from major public universities, predicted this earlier in the week.

We analyse a mathematical model of susceptible-infected-recovered-death (SIRD) type to calculate the active cases trajectory, which is predicted by the model till the end of this year; in comparison, we also plot the actual active cases in Malaysia. Overall, we can see that the SIRD model analysis agrees with the number of active cases and the model is able to mimic the trend of infection trajectories of our country’s Covid-19 scenarios. Based on the simulation of this model, we observed that the number of active Covid-19 cases in Malaysia would pass 10,000 cases as soon as Oct 27 or 28, as has happened.