Omicron wave appears to have peaked, says Noor Hisham
Published on: Saturday, March 12, 2022
By:
Predeep Nambiar, FMT
.jpg "Omicron wave appears to have peaked, says Noor Hisham")
Health director-general Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah speaking at an event at the Penang Institute today. (Facebook pic)
GEORGE TOWN: The number of Covid-19 cases caused by the more infectious Omicron variant appears to have plateaued, health director-general Noor Hisham Abdullah said today.
He said the current 30,000-odd cases daily was lower than the earlier projection of 50,000 to 60,000.
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However, he said he was cautiously optimistic that case numbers would take a dip, as experienced in the Philippines.
“At first, our numbers came down and went up a bit, likely due to a specific Omicron subtype. But despite this up-and-down movement, it is plateauing within 30,000 cases now. So, it is good that it is not continuing to increase,” he said.
The infectivity number was also at 1.03 “so it’s on a stable spread. If the R0 number drops to 0.8, that would be better,” he told reporters.
Noor Hisham said the ministry suspected that the Omicron subtypes BA1 and BA2 were currently in the mix, but a true picture would be known in the next two weeks after genomic sequencing was carried out.
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The World Health Organization had said initial data suggested the new BA2 variant “appeared inherently more transmissible than BA1”, and further studies were ongoing to discover why this was the case.
Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah (second from right) receiving the award for leadership in public health from Anwar Fazal, president of the Dr Wu Lien-Teh Society. With them are the society’s secretary-general Hor Chee Peng (left) and Penang Institute’s Ooi Kee Beng.
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Noor Hisham also called for those frequently exposed to the public to continue testing via RTK antigen kits.
He said such tests should be done when the virus was at its highest loads, on Day 1 and Day 3.
He said the primary concern was about how infectious a Covid-19-positive person was. He said one could be positive, yet not infectious.
“We are looking at the infectivity period rather than the positivity. A person can be positive for 14 to 21 days, but you are not infectious. So RTK can detect high virus loads, but not low loads that are not detectable,” he said.
Noor Hisham said those without any public events or were in close contact with an infected person should test when they get symptoms. In the case of the Omicron variant, the symptoms could show as early as two to three days.
“If you are fully vaccinated, and you are negative by Day 3 or 5, you are okay,” he said in response to a question on the Malaysian Medical Association’s advice asking people to only self-test when necessary, following panic buying of self-test kits.
Noor Hisham was at the Penang Institute to receive the inaugural Dr Wu Lien-Teh award for leadership in public health. The award was presented by Anwar Fazal, president of the Dr Wu Lien-Teh Society.
The society was set up to honour the Penang-born doctor who successfully fought an epidemic in China in the 1930s and pioneered the use of masks to control the spread of infectious diseases.
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