KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia needs RM10 billion to safely ride out the Covid-19 pandemic next year.
Dr Maznah Dahlui, a lead researcher in the Covid-19 Epidemiological Analysis and Strategies Taskforce (CEASE) under the Science, Technology and Innovation Ministry, said the sum was projected to cover treatment, contact tracing, surveillance and testing, on top of the cost for delivering and administering vaccines when they were available.
"This sum, however, hinges on the prospect of the availability of a viable vaccine, a swift tapering of the current wave that is projected to stretch to March, as well as having fewer and shorter outbreaks.
"Currently, the ministry has spent an estimated RM2 billion on Covid-19. The authorities are also likely to be dipping into other funds where money, labour and resources meant for other health issues and diseases are diverted for Covid-19 as the emergency reserves deplete," she told the New Straits Times.
Sharing the preliminary findings based on the raw data that the research group had extracted from the ministry, Dr Maznah said her team calculated that the ministry had spend RM820 million in treatment charges for the 35,425 Covid-19 patients up to Wednesday.
"The estimates are based on per-episode treatment in intensive care wards for a week at cost of the RM4,000 per day and treatments in regular wards for an assumed period of 14 days."
"We drew on global statistics on the distribution of the severity of cases, which show that one per cent of patients require intensive care and ventilators, five per cent have moderate to severe symptoms and the other 94 per cent are asymptomatic, to arrive at the figures."
She said the figure did not include spending for drugs used in the treatment, estimated to be around RM76 million.
Dr Maznah estimated that the ministry had spent an addition of between RM1 billion and RM2 billion on Personal Protective Equipment, ventilators, contact tracing, testing facilities, as well as setting up labs, field hospitals and low-risk quarantine centres.
She also estimated that RM9 million was pumped into contact tracing, with RM556 million going into testing.
The public health specialist drew on data from the World Health Organisation citing that close to two million had been tested recently at the cost of RM278 per test.
She believed public healthcare services would not collapse even if the new wave of Covid-19 infections extended to the first quarter of next year.
"However, we would be managing it at the expense of other diseases, such as non-communicable diseases (NCD) and the treatment of other infectious diseases, such as dengue," she said, adding that the country recorded RM8.91 billion loss in productivity annually from NCD, such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease and hypertension.
She said NCD being the leading cause of mortality in Malaysia also required an additional spending of RM5 billion, compared with the year before, for treatment, early intervention, treatment and awareness campaigns.
"Deaths related to Covid-19 are at one per cent, which is lower than the death rate for many NCD diseases."
She stressed on the need to protect groups at risk of NCD as the country could risk facing a national health crisis following a surge in NCD cases after the pandemic was over.
"We can already see how the pandemic has taken a toll (on the wellbeing of NCD patients), with delayed appointments, infrequent hospital visits and disrupted treatments. These affect the elderly and B40 groups, who can't afford to go to private facilities," said the professor from the Social and Preventive Medicine Department of Universiti Malaya.
Health spending has been on a general upward trend both in overall amounts and in proportion to the budget. The last budget tabled by Pakatan Harapan for 2020 last year had allocated RM30.6 billion for the ministry, out of the total budget of RM297 billion.
Budget 2019 allocated RM28.7 billion in health spending which attributed to 9.1 per cent of the overall budget.
Health director-general Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah had said that the ministry had received an additional RM1 billion for human resource allowances, equipment and consumables over and above the allocation in the 2020 Budget.