KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 19 — A total of 9,167 Covid-19 cases have been detected through the MySejahtera application as of November 18, the Ministry of Health (MOH) said today.
According to a statement by Health director-general Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah, the MOH Covid-19 management app — which identifies cases through users’ self-health evaluation and contact tracing — tracks between 18.2 and 44.3 per cent of cases on average. (The percentage changes from time to time because it depends on the number of daily cases and the number of cases who use MySejahtera).
As of November 18, a total of 1,561 cases, which comprised 3.1 to 6.5 per cent of cumulative cases in the country, were detected through the self-health evaluation function on MySejahtera.
This self-health assessment function allows users to assess their risk of Covid-19 according to MOH guidelines.
A total of 7,606 cases (15.1 till 37.8 per cent) of close contacts were identified and detected positive through this application.
On the other hand, on November 12, Health Minister Dr Adham Baba in a written Parliamentary reply said that the MySejahtera application has only directly detected four per cent of the total Covid-19 cases in Malaysia through the app’s health self-evaluation function.
Dr Noor Hisham said today in his statement that MySejahtera data is shared with district health officers for close contact identification. The data for close contacts is collected under a MySejahtera check-in module, where the record of people who checked in at various premises through a QR code is kept.
He gave an example of how a total of 17,260 users were detected through the MySejahtera app for the Utama cluster that was first detected at a shopping mall in Petaling Jaya, Selangor.
From the total users, 1,343 individuals were identified by the district health officer for further assessment. Then, 457 individuals were confirmed as close contacts. A total of 221 of those 457 individuals tested positive with Covid-19.
Out of the 236 confirmed Covid-19 cases in the Utama cluster that were reported on the same day, 221 of them, or 93 per cent, had been detected through MySejahtera. It is unclear what Dr Noor Hisham meant by reporting 236 cases in the Utama cluster on the same day; he previously said in a statement that 105 Covid-19 cases were reported on October 15 from the Utama cluster.
As of October 15, a total of 132 cases were linked to the Utama cluster, most of whom were security guards that comprised 87 of cases, followed by 18 cleaners who worked at the shopping centre. The Utama cluster, whose index case was a Nepalese security guard, then comprised 107 foreigners and 25 Malaysians. By October 20, the Utama cluster racked up 194 infections.
Dr Noor Hisham also said today that the MySejahtera app follows global standards and safety to protect its data. The personal data of users collected is also protected under The Personal Data Protection Act 2010.
According to Dr Noor Hisham, all check-in data collected is archived for 30 days and will be destroyed after 90 days.
So far, MySejahtera has 1.7 billion cumulative check-ins at premises, with daily average check-ins of 15 million. As of November 18, the app has a total of 23,953,970 users, with a total of 1,058,853 premises registered under this app.
