KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia’s testing and screening processes for Covid-19 are adequate and meet the benchmark of the World Health Organisation (WHO).
During his media briefing yesterday, Health director-general Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said that the Health Ministry is doing active case detection for all suspected cases being traced, tested, isolated or treated.
He said a spike in the number of Covid-19 cases in the country is to be expected given active case detection.
“Our lab capacity has also increased to 43 so far. We started by testing only around 3,000 samples a day at 18 hospitals,” Dr Noor Hisham added.
Besides the Health Ministry’s hospitals, which include Sibu Hospital in Sarawak and Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Sabah, testing is also being conducted at the Institute for Medical Research (IMR), public health laboratories, private laboratories, 14 university laboratories, as well as the Malaysia Genome Institute and a laboratory under the armed forces.
Given this, Malaysia is expected to increase its testing capacity to at least 16,500 daily.
“At the moment, we do not have a test that has very high accuracy. We hope to continue trying out a few test kits and if the accuracy is more than 75 to 80 per cent, then that would be the best for us.
“For now, test accuracy is around 56 per cent, but what is more important is whether we are testing adequately for our population. That is the big question,” said Dr Noor Hisham.
For this, Malaysia falls back on WHO’s guideline. For example, if 100 people are tested in the community and 80 are positive, that shows that many more positive cases in the community are not being detected.
However, if in 100 tests, only 10 cases (or 10 per cent) are positive, that is adequate in terms of screening and testing for the community.
In Malaysia, the total number of people who have been tested so far is 45,378 with, 3,333 returning positive tests (as of April 2) – accounting for 7.3 per cent of tests.
“We still have 7,000 tests pending, meaning the test results have not been verified yet, whether positive or negative, and if we minus these pending cases, we stand at 9 per cent, and 9 per cent falls within the benchmark of WHO.
“We do not expect to test (all) 30 million of our population. We are within the WHO benchmark,” he stressed.
On March 24, Dr Noor Hisham said that Covid-19 laboratory tests at government health facilities were using the Real-Time Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (rRT-PCR) technique. The test detects the presence of the Covid-19 virus in a patient’s body.
One of the countries lauded for its widespread testing ability is South Korea, which was reported to be testing around 15,000 people daily last month.