Coronavirus (COVID-19), which first originated in Wuhan, China in December 2019 has spread out to more than 201 countries and territories around the world within four months.
China, as the first country that suffered from COVID-19 had announced a full lock-down since the Chinese New Year period. After close to two months, the Chinese authority had announced that they will lift the travel restrictions in and out of the province as the domestic cases have dropped to practically zero. However, the pandemic is now spreading fast in many other countries. Countries such as Italy and the US have seen a sharp increase in the infected numbers over the last two weeks, where Italy has the largest number of deaths amongst others.
According to the graph above, it can be observed that Italy has been leading in terms of nett infected cases per 1 million population since early March 2020. Nett infected cases per 1 million population are calculated as “total confirmed cases minus total recovered cases,” divided by the number of million population. This method is to analyse the spread of COVID-19 infected cases in relation to the country’s total population. Italy’s infected cases were increasing, however, starting from the 2nd week of March, Switzerland confirmed cases surpassed Italy’s on 22nd March 2020, and it ranked 1st in terms of nett infected cases per 1 million population. Although the US has recorded the highest confirmed cases among other countries in the past one week from 26th March to 31st March, the nett infected cases per 1 million population are still lower compared to Switzerland and Italy. While the world is badly affected by COVID-19, China has been showing a sign of recovering for the past one month. China’s nett infected cases per 1 million population are below 5 cases per 1 million population (pmp), compared to Switzerland with 1708 cases pmp, Italy with 1490 cases pmp and the US with 553 cases pmp as of 31st March 2020.
Malaysia’s COVID-19 nett infected cases per 1 million population are lower than China from the beginning of March 2020. From 15th March 2020 onwards, Malaysia’s nett infected cases per 1 million population overtook China as its nett infected cases have been reducing gradually since early March 2020. Malaysia’s figures are rising aggressively since 15th March from 12 cases pmp to 70 cases pmp on 31st March 2020. The Malaysian government has imposed its first-ever Movement Control Order (MCO) to restrict people’s physical movement to avoid social contacting in the hope to reduce the possibility of getting infected.
Despite many efforts in developing COVID-19 vaccines, we know that it is not something that can happen overnight. The best way to prevent infection is still to take daily preventive actions, like avoiding close contact with people who are sick and washing your hands often. While the current focus of the world should be stopping the COVID-19 from continue spreading, Governments and businesses should also start strategizing the next step to recover from the impact brought by the COVID-19.
