I have been reading tweets saying, our past efforts staying at home become worthless as the MCO is loosened. Let me tell you why loosening the MCO now is actually the BEST strategy.

In short, understand the science of infectious disease (epidemiology) and different strategies.

A restriction of movement order or a lockdown is never a strategy to cut down the infection completely. The lockdown strategy aims to cut down an uncontrolled transmission to a controllable rate.

After that, the next strategies come to maintain the transmission at that rate.

Long-term lockdown is never a good idea. It has many side effects, especially economy, psychology and wellness.

Doesn’t matter how long you lockdown, you can’t ‘completely’ cut the disease, until a vaccine becomes globally available.

Pernah rendam bola dalam air tak? Once kau lepas je bola tu, dia akan melantun tinggi.

That’s what happens to lockdown when you completely uplift it. Sebab suppress lama sangat, ramai yang masih vulnerable dan tak dijangkiti.

That’s why, once a transmission achieves a controllable rate, we use different strategies. Complete restriction/lockdown is not effective anymore.

Next strategies are massive testing on suspects, new normal, case isolation, technologies to detect infected people, etc.

Here’s the current graph for Malaysia. See the daily cases has effectively cut down (top graph)? And see we already at the controllable transmission rate (bottom)?

That’s why now we are adopting new strategies. We also need to ‘bayar balik’ the consequences from the past MCO.

Economy, psychology, wellness, health. Those all need to be balanced.

And we now know that Malaysia prioritises our health than other aspects. Now, we need to get back to balance the other aspects back.