PUTRAJAYA: The nation has seen improvement following the implementation of Conditional Movement Control Order (CMCO), Enhanced MCO (EMCO) and Targeted EMCO (TEMCO), with a drop in the infectivity rate or R-Naught (RO) value from 2.2 in the beginning of the Covid-19 third wave to the current 1.2.
Health director-general Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said the 1.2 value, however, was still not good enough.
He said although there was no exponential surge, the number of new cases was consistently increasing every day.
"In the beginning of the third wave of the infection, it (RO) was 2.2. After the reimposition of CMCO, the RO value dropped to 1.5 and today, it is 1.2. However, it is still not enough. CMCO is a hybrid model that we implemented in areas that are affected.
"If we were to implement MCO (again), it will greatly impact the economy, so that is why we adopted the CMCO approach. A few areas are also placed under TEMCO and we do screening in the community such as in Benteng Lahad Datu cluster.
"These are the approaches that we have done and the outcome from these approaches contributed to the current value of the RO," he said at his daily Covid-19 press conference at the ministry.
Dr Noor Hisham said the ministry was determined to bring the RO value down to less than 1.0.
He added although it may take a longer time to achieve such a value, he observed that Malaysia has shown good results in terms of the drop in Covid-19 cases, even when 50 per cent of the positive cases came from the prisons.
"If possible, we want to bring it down to an RO rate of 0.3 and then we can flatten the curve.
"We will continue to conduct active case detection and Covid-19 surveillance," he said.