Yeah Kim Leng of Sunway University said the government should revise the national recovery plan and not wait until the end of the year to lift restrictions.
“Way too much damage” was being done to the economy, he said. “A lot of businesses are at the tipping point from facing lockdown after lockdown. Most of them are likely to go bankrupt if not allowed to open within a month or so.
“If we wait till October to open all sectors, the damage may be irreversible,” he said.
Yeah said the tourism sector had been almost wiped out, with most players closing their businesses for good.
Under the recovery plan, Malaysia will transition to Phase 2 from the current lockdown once Covid-19 cases dip below 4,000 daily and 10% of the population are vaccinated.
Phase 3 will be initiated once daily cases drop to 2,000 and Phase 4, under which all sectors will be allowed to be open, will start once daily infections drop to 500.
“It will be too costly to impose nationwide lockdowns and wait for infections to go down,” Yeah said. “The fight has to be brought to the local level with enhanced MCOs.”
He said most businesses in the food and beverage, transport, hotel and other local industries would not survive the indefinite lockdown under Phase 1 of the recovery plan.
He suggested that the government at least allow dine-ins for two with strict SOPs if Covid cases within the food and beverage industry were low.
“If the ventilation at restaurants is poor, the government could introduce new SOPs,” he said.
“The government needs evidence-based measures as the present measures may not be productive.”
Yeah also said the government would have to prepare a plan to battle an endemic Covid-19 with effective SOPs.
Another economist, Barjoyai Bardai of Universiti Tun Abdul Razak, urged the government to acknowledge that Covid-19 was already endemic.
“We can no longer target for zero Covid cases but have to lay out different SOPs for different sectors,” he said.
Barjoyai called for an increased rate of testing for the virus and suggested self-testing and the use of breathalysers like in Singapore.
He said Malaysia could also buy similar breath analysers from Indonesia, which would be cheaper than getting them from Singapore.
He warned that total lockdowns would lead to an increase in the number of poor households in the country.
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