KUALA LUMPUR: The Health Ministry should create a Smart Tracking System dependent on smartphones and web dashboards to detect people's movement and location, and to update their real-time status.
Melaka Manipal Medical College's Community and Occupational Medicine Professor Dr G. Jayakumar said the system would improve communication, surveillance and direct monitoring of people from various locations.
"The current tracking, tracing and reporting system of Covid-19 is laborious and inefficient. Therefore, we need to re-strategise our efforts to combat this pandemic.
"Timely detection of cases, quarantine, treatment of cases and vaccination are the cornerstones to contain the pandemic," he told the New Straits Times.
Besides that, Dr Jayakumar called on the ministry to decentralise and empower the state Health Departments to advocate preventive measures.
"Different states, from Selangor to Sarawak, have varying local issues that may need different strategies to overcome this pandemic.
"We need to pay more attention to institutions like prisons, detention centres for illegal immigrants, old folks' homes and foreign workers' housing quarters with enforcement and vaccination efforts.
"The ministry should rope in professional bodies like the Malaysian Medical Association, local universities and other related agencies, and work in synergy to overcome this pandemic."
Universiti Sains Malaysia medical epidemiologist Associate Professor Dr Kamarul Imran Musa urged the ministry to produce more effective real-time data reporting, data sharing and data dissemination.
"Our research team noticed some discrepancy in the data reported at the national and state levels.
"We understand there might be changes to numbers due to changes in definitions, recalculations and reconfirmation of diagnosis over time. But the Health Ministry should update this as soon as possible.
"Moving forward, we need one 'gold standard' data source that represents the country's Covid-19 status most accurately and the onus is on the Crisis Preparedness and Response Centre (CPRC) to develop this."
Dr Kamarul said the scientific community was also rooting for the CPRC to provide user-friendly data to enhance research productivity.
"First, the data reported should contain adequate variables for analysis.
"Second, the data should be reported in the form of line listing, meaning that the data for each individual Covid-19 case should be included. The name, location and other personal details of the cases can be kept anonymous. Currently, the ministry makes only cumulative reporting of aggregated data.
"Third, the data must contain critical information such as the date of the onset of symptoms and the date of notification when cases (patients) tested positive.
"The Health Ministry should encourage modellers to download the data and develop models for us understand the dynamics of Covid-19 transmission.
"This is crucial to improve our control-and-prevention measures to stem the spread of Covid-19."