KUCHING: The State Disaster Management Committee (SDMC) is planning to have a ‘temporary quarantine and treatment facility’ to ensure that Sarawak is prepared for more Covid-19 cases should the situation worsen.
“We are in active discussion,” said its chairman Datuk Amar Douglas Uggah Embas, adding that they are hoping for the best but preparing for the worst with regard to the fight against Covid-19.
“One way is to ensure that we have enough hospital beds,” he said when speaking at the Covid-19 daily update press conference at Wisma Bapa Malaysia here yesterday.
“We look at the experiences of other countries ― those who have succeeded and those who have failed, and we follow how they are prepared to handle the Covid-19 pandemic,” he added.
He said the committee would inform the public on the temporary hospital’s location and capacity in the near future.
Meanwhile, he said that 57 frontliners in Sarawak had tested positive for Covid-19 thus far, adding that some of these cases were not directly from the front-line cluster and had gotten Covid-19 from other sources.
He said that there are sufficient supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE) to last one month and another RM7 million worth of PPE had been ordered by the State Health Department (JKNS) to supplement this stock.
Uggah pointed out that RM6.5 million was spent by the state government to purchase PPE for healthcare facilities.
“We have also received a lot of donations from Malaysians, either in cash or in kind, and the Health Ministry is also providing some stock.”
He said SDMC advised all hospitals to be transparent and inform the committee on issues they are facing, including giving an early update when their PPE stocks are running low.
“We told these frontliners to focus on healthcare while SDMC will focus on ensuring that they have the required amount of PPE,” he assured.
On another note, he said that there had been no cases so far in which non-Covid-19 patients were transferred from Sarawak General Hospital (SGH) to private hospitals for further treatment.
He also said that five foreigners had tested positive for Covid-19 in Sarawak.
