Press Statement By Julian Tan：
The Sarawak government need to step one step ahead of the COVID19 pandemic. Prior to the second wave, the failure of the State Disaster Management Committee (SDMC) makes face masks mandatory, lack of enforcement, and to be transparent and make available places visited by COVID-19 patients, lead to the start of the second wave of COVID-19 in the state.
In Singapore, the ministry update information on the locations and times that infectious COVID-19 patients have visited for at least 30mins. This is proven to be effective in curbing the second wave. The full list of locations and times can be found on the official government website. Thus, Malaysia authorities’ excuse for not stigmatizing businesses is not founded. On the contrary, by not providing an official go-to place for people to obtain reliable information, we are allowing speculations and false information to circulate wildly, and businesses suffer. Past few days, we have seen the need of business owners to clarify on fake news circulating that COVID-19 patients visited the premises.
The disclosing of information allows people who visited the premises before to monitor their health and get tested should the needs arise. It is not to warn people against visiting the place. Affected places will be thoroughly cleaned and make sure it is safe for workers and customers to go back again. All this information should be available at our fingertips. We already have various apps developed for combating COVID19 by the government, the money spent should be put to good use.
Therefore, it is imperative that the state government to continuously be ahead of the game and not to take it lightly on anticipating the second wave. The severity of the COVID-19 impact on business is unprecedented. Most will not be able to take a second hit. The coming of second wave is real, last Friday HONG KONG’S new coronavirus outbreak is set to surpass the magnitude of its previous wave of infections, a similar scenario can also be seen building in Japan and Australia with Australian state makes face mask mandatory after surge in cases, reflecting the challenge of containing the pathogen even in places that were widely lauded and emulated for their containment strategies.
