Media Statement by Member of Parliament for Iskandar Puteri, Lim Kit Siang in Kuala Lumpur on 29 October 2020:
Sabah general election is Malaysia’s Covid-19 super-spreader event but Malaysians must show unity and discipline to prove wrong the modelling projection of academicians that there will be 15,000 active cases in Malaysia by Nov. 8
It is bizarre following the United States Presidential election.
Malaysia is struggling to ensure that we avoid four-digit daily increase of Covid-19 infections, although we have failed twice on the 24th and 26th October when we recorded 1,228 and 1,240 Covid-19 new cases respectively.
The United States is not struggling to avoid a four-digit daily increase, but to avoid seven-digit daily increase, recording more than 84,000 new Covid-19 cases last Friday – which is about thrice of the cumulative total of Covid-19 cases in Malaysia after nine months of the Covid-19 pandemic, viz: 29,441 cases.
Yesterday in one single day, 1,038 Americans died of Covid-19, which is about four times the cumulative total of Malaysians casualties after nine months.
Yesterday was a day of many grim milestones for the Covid-19 pandemic. For the first time, global daily increase of Covid-19 infections exceeded the half-a-million mark, as the Covid-19 world-o-meter website recorded a daily increase of 500,764 cases.
It took 13 weeks for the first million Covid-19 cases to be recorded in the world, but the exponential increase of the Covid-19 pandemic is such that it now takes two days for the global million mark of daily increase to be recorded.
The second global grim milestone is that the United States has crossed the nine million mark for total Covid-19 infections, together with more than 230,000 fatalities. India, the second top nation in the world for the most Covid-19 cases, has passed the eight million mark, while there are eight countries with over a million cases – after United States and India are Brazil, Russia, France, Spain, Argentina and Colombia.
Yet we have Donald Trump closing his re-election campaign by pleading with voters to ignore the evidence of a calamity unfolding before their eyes and trust his word that the disease is already disappearing as a threat to their personal health and economic well-being.
If Trump loses in next week US presidential election, as most analysts predict, he will be defeated not so much by Joe Biden but by the Covid-19 epidemic.
The United States and Europe are not examples for Malaysians to follow in the war against the Covid-19 epidemic.
We already have the recent Sabah state general election as a Covid-19 super-spreader event.
Malaysians must show greater unity and discipline to forge an “all-of-government” and “whole-of-society” war against the Covid-19 epidemic and prove wrong the modelling projection of academicians that there will be 15,000 active cases by November 8, 2020.
Lim Kit Siang,
Member of Parliament for Iskandar Puteri.
