KUALA LUMPUR: MySejahtera check-ins are still relevant for detecting close contacts and positive Covid-19 cases, especially during the peak of the Omicron wave.
Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin said during the variant's peak, 45 per cent of those notified as casual contacts were found positive and had isolated themselves.
"To say that the contact tracing system is irrelevant… I disagree. The casual contacts were isolated through contact tracing on MySejahtera. The app is still valuable as a tool for contact tracing," he said in a press conference in Parliament today.
He added that the Health Ministry would decide on whether to continue with MySejahtera check-ins within a week or two after studying the infection pattern and trend.
On the issue of MySejahtera application ownership, Khairy said the ministry was still in the final stages of discussions.
He had previously refuted claims that the government had sold MySejahtera to a private entity, adding that the government had, on Nov 26 last year, decided that MySejahtera would be the government's property and appointed the Health Ministry as the main owner of the application for the country's public health management.
During a debate in Dewan Negara late last month, Khairy, in assuring the security of MySejahtera's database, had said information obtained through the app was only for the purposes of mitigating the spread of Covid-19.
He had said the usage and management of MySejahtera data was subject to the Prevention and Control of Infectious Disease Act 1988 and the Medical Act 1971.
He had also stressed that daily data transactions from the MySejahtera application stored on the cloud network could only be used for the purpose of the application as well as Covid-19 prevention support such as vaccination models.
The media had reported that MySejahtera check-ins dropped 26 per cent by some 6.3 million on March 28 following this controversy, which led to calls to boycott the use of the application on social media under the hashtag #StopUsingMySejahtera.