KUCHING: Local Government and Housing Minister Datuk Seri Dr Sim Kui Hian believes that more Covid-19 clusters will be declared in Kuching.
He said this prediction was based on the locations of exposure and extensive community spread, with certain exposure locations repeating numerous times.
The Sarawak Disaster Management Committee (SDMC) advisor pointed out that on Wednesday (May 12), six out of the seven new clusters declared were within Kuching.
“Very important for PKB (Division Health Office), JKNS (State Health Department), and KKM (Health Ministry) to declare clusters in a timely fashion as soon as possible,” he said in a Facebook post on Wednesday night.
“Dr Sim also pointed out that there were 65 cases reported in total for the Kuching-Samarahan-Serian zone, an increasing trend.
“It signifies very widespread community infections and these will be very challenging to control,” he said.
“The next four weeks will be very critical for Kuching,” warned Dr Sim.
He said it was the third consecutive day of increasing number of patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) and intubated patients on ventilators in Sarawak General Hospital (SGH), adding that a close eye must be kept on this trend.
“We need everyone to help keep the numbers down so that our hospital will not be full, overrun and collapse due to Covid-19. The circuit breaker is to help us prevent a massive surge of cases.
“It could buy us time to allow vaccines to arrive in large quantities so that we can immediately scale up our vaccinations for those who have registered,” he said.
Dr Sim emphasised the importance of averting a medical crisis such as the one occurring in India.
He added that in West Malaysia a few months ago, there were more clusters than sporadic cases. Today, however, he said the majority of cases were sporadic and few were clusters.
