KUALA LUMPUR: It is still unclear whether a person who recovers from Covid-19 can be reinfected.
Immunologist Dr Shamala Devi K.C. Sekaran said like most aspects of the virus, this too, was not clearly understood.
“The question is still under study. At the moment, we don’t know whether we can get reinfected or not. If we do, we don’t know if our immunity will be good or bad.”
She said based on her experience with other coronaviruses, people who had been infected twice would normally build up an immunity.
“Some of us will develop it (immunity). Since it’s the first time the body is seeing (Covid-19), it’s going to take anything between three and four, or seven and 10 days before an immune response comes up.
“And throughout that period, you will be infectious,” said Dr Shamala.
She was part of a panel discussion on adapting to the challenges of Covid-19, moderated by Science, Technology and Innovation Minister Khairy Jamaluddin, which was live-streamed on Facebook on Thursday.
She said asymptomatic carriers of the virus were the main transmitters, and this was compounded by poor hygiene.
She cautioned against the misconception that testing negative for Covid-19 meant one was out of the woods.
“If you have been in the vicinity of someone with the disease after the test, it has to be repeated within five to seven days of the first test,” Dr Shamala said, urging the public to stick to real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction tests as it was the most reliable.
She said healthcare workers should be tested once every seven days as they were exposed to the virus daily.
She said the young and old were equally susceptible, but the recovery rate might be slower for the elderly and those with chronic diseases.
“That’s when you get a severe or critical form of the affliction. The mortality rate among the elderly is higher,” she said, citing the case of Italy.
However, she said, not all who tested positive would be warded in the intensive care unit and hooked up to ventilators, as 80 per cent of the cases were mild.
Only 10 to 15 per cent were severe and another five per cent were critical.
Dr Shamala said it would take at least one year for a vaccine to be developed.
“Most of them (researchers) are speeding up the process. Nations are also fast-tracking regulatory procedures so that they may be able to achieve and perform animal and human trials. But even then, one year is optimistic.”
Epidemiologist Datuk Dr Awang Bulgiba Awang Mahmud said Malaysia had a small window of time to arrest the outbreak, adding that isolation measures, such as the Movement Control Order (MCO) and other methods, had been used since the 7th century.
He said the MCO should be eased only when the number of cases had peaked and started to drop.
Although achieving this within 14 days might mean that the country had contained the outbreak and people could go back to their lives, Dr Awang Bulgiba said contagious diseases had a way of re-emerging.
“Even if we are not quarantined, social distancing will be here to stay in Malaysia for the next three to six months.”
On why the government did not opt to create herd immunity, he replied it was unclear how effective that would be.
“If we are sure that the virus does not cause ill effects, then that’s alright. But we are not sure.
“Lets say 95 per cent of Malaysia, which is 27 to 28 million people, are infected and one per cent of them die. That means 280,000 Malaysians will die before we get herd immunity. That is frightening and unacceptable. Only 160,000 Malaysians die annually under normal circumstances.
“No epidemiologist will say this is a good step as the deaths we see in Italy and China are not at one per cent of those infected, but four to nine per cent.”
Dr Awang Bulgiba said this would burden the healthcare system and the Health Ministry had only about 42,000 beds, with 3,000 to 4,000 spare beds.
“If one per cent of infected Malaysians need treatment and we build hospitals, we still won’t have the capacity. We also have only around 1,200 ventilators nationwide. With suppression, at least for now, we can buy time for vaccines to be developed.”