#4 Post COVID-19: The ongoing beginning of pandemic

by: Nur Hidayah binti Abdul Rahim

It is been over one years we experienced the this pandemic. I still remembered when the virus is still new. Some of people, scared, worried and there are also people confidently said no to worry because the virus will not come to Malaysia. Now it feels funny whenever I saw that 'confident' person.

On 17th December 2020, Indonesia conducted a webinar about Cities and COVID-19: Indonesia's response. The webinar discussed about how Indonesia face the pandemic throughout the year. The first panelist, Mr. Roberts PhD, said according to Organization for economic co-operation and development (OECD), health problems are not related to urban density, but rather to structural inequality and the quality of urbanization. It is true that COVID have created unusual challenges especially to the cities that rely on tourism, business and international students because of the global and domestic travel restrictions. Not only that, many cities were reducing their abilities to implement urban development plans due to the COVID-19. Risk identification is a must in the development of an effective strategy. We should understand which risks are most at risk so that it will help us to formulate a plan that can meet challenges and have a big positive impact.

Indonesia has the highest transmission and death rates of COVID-19 in Asia, December 2020. The Impact of COVID-19 on urban Indonesia was major cities, not only in Indonesia but Asia, were hardest hit by the pandemic and the pandemic are now still spreading to other cities that are smaller in scale. In the webinar, the first panelist also said that women and disabilities, especially in urban areas are the most economically and socially vulnerable groups because they do not secure employment contracts.

Meanwhile in Malaysia, many people in B40 and M40 groups were most vulnerable groups. It is because many of them lost their jobs since their workplace needed to shutdown. Also, there are lots of people who their salaries were cut and they only got a sadly small amount of salary. In fact, most of them, doing more than 2 works in a day. Lets say, they working at the office from 8am to 5pm, then they continue to do food delivery or selling foods at night market.

Deputy Governor of DKI Jakarta, Ms. Suharti PhD, shared Jakarta's experience in handling the COVID-19. They used the usual protocol for the public which are public must wear mask, maintaining physical distancing and washing hands. Not only that, the health sector's priority are testing, tracing and treatment. Jakarta had 22,887 tests per day with 8 times WHO's recommendation. Jakarta also had 6,565 isolation beds and 892 ICUs dedicated for COVID-19 in 98 public and private hospitals and accommodations for self-isolations.

In Malaysia, we developed the MySejahtera apps but in Indonesia, they developed a digital system called JAKI (Jakarta Kini) apps where it provides various COVID-19 data, information and features such as self-screening via Corona Likelihood Meter (CLM), contact tracing and checkpoint monitoring. Users can also actively participate to report COVID-19 protocol violations. I believed this is a good idea and Malaysia should add this feature in MySejahtera apps where Malaysian can immediately report to the authorities if they witnessed people violates the government SOP (Standard Operating Procedures). With this features in MySejahtera apps, people can upload the pictures where it can be the proof. So, it will make the authorities' work easier. The authorities did not have to waste or use long time to trace, investigate and find proof because the people can provide the proof and explanations in the apps.