KUALA LUMPUR, August 3 — HealthMetrics is aware that vaccination is crucial in lowering fatalities and reducing symptoms, even if they are infected with Covid-19 at any given time. Vaccination is also essential in building herd immunity within the community, creating protection for people who cannot receive the vaccine.
For instance, specific vulnerable groups cannot receive the shot due to a likelihood of suffering severe allergic reactions because of the components used in the vaccine, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Alongside the government’s efforts in overcoming the pandemic, HealthMetrics has launched its “Race to Herd Immunity” campaign, which the company kicked off in May with a community webinar as part of its corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, in a bid to educate the community on the different vaccines, address the community’s questions, and dispel any misinformation.
Prior to this, HealthMetrics also launched a Covid-19 DocBot, whereby the public can chat with a chatbot to learn more about Covid-19. The company has also launched the Covid-19 screening locator, whereby its corporate clients and members are able to locate the nearest health care partners that offer RT-PCR and RTK tests.
HealthMetrics is also supporting the government’s expansion of vaccination efforts via private partnerships to speed up nationwide vaccination efforts. On this note, HealthMetrics is partnering with Health Junction and Malaysian Genomics Resource Centre (MGRC) Berhad to offer vaccination services to organisations looking to have their employees vaccinated to protect the workforce with the eventual objective to restart operations in line with the post-Movement Control Order (MCO) market reopening.
Vaccination should be done as soon as it is available and must be accessible to all, especially to essential workers in the manufacturing industry. Manufacturing industry employees might not be considered as frontliners, but looking at the cases that mostly originated from work clusters, and variants that are mutating heavily, speeding up vaccination at all levels is crucial to ensure that virus mutation will not evolve within the community.
The concept is that the longer the virus is in the community, transmission will be made easier. This will allow the virus to have a higher survival rate, hence giving it time to mutate into more dangerous variants.
As of today, WHO has listed four variants of concern (VOC) and four variants of interest (VOI) that has been evolved from the Covid-19 virus.
Alvin Yuan, CEO of HealthMetrics, hopes that this effort will get more people vaccinated, in line with the government’s goal to get 80 per cent of the Malaysian population vaccinated by the end of 2022.
With this integrated effort, through the National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme (PICK) or private channels, the goal of herd immunity within the community can be achieved faster.
The HealthMetrics platform also includes a feature that assists users to locate the nearest registered health care provider which provides Covid-19 tests. With this, HealthMetrics users can easily locate the nearest clinic from their current location.
