SAMARAHAN: There is no reason to enforce a lockdown on the Sarawak General Hospital (SGH), said Deputy Chief Minister Datuk Amar Douglas Uggah Embas.
He said although there was a Covid-19 cluster involving healthcare workers and 52 healthcare workers had tested positive for Covid-19 as of Tuesday (April 28), the majority of them had not contracted Covid-19 while treating patients.
“Many of them actually belong to some of the other clusters,” he said during a site visit to active case detection programme locations in Kota Samarahan yesterday.
He was responding to a letter by a ‘concerned citizen’ which had gone viral on social media, calling for SGH to be put under a lockdown to control the spread of the virus among healthcare workers.
“So, it cannot be assumed that because they are healthcare workers, they all got infected within the hospital,” said Uggah, who is also Sarawak Disaster Management Committee (SDMC) chairman.
He said that there were many experienced doctors at SGH dealing with infectious diseases and their standard operating procedures (SOPs) for dealing with the current situation were very clear.
Besides, he said, sufficient personal protective equipment (PPE) was available at the hospital.
“So, there is no reason for SGH to be locked down,” he stressed.
