Explaining via a Facebook post late Monday night, Health director-general Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said that implementing the CMCO was a balance between health and economy.
"It is a challenge to safeguard & strike a balance between health & economy from COVID-19.
"A lost of balance means lost of lives & lost of livelihoods. Conditional MCO allows the economy & supply chain to continue without disruption but restriction on social & education sectors," he wrote.
Not an easy decision
On Monday evening (12 October), Dr Noor Hisham said that CMCO had to be implemented in Selangor, Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya due to cases being widespread in terms of location.According to a report by The Star, he said that while the total number of cases within each district was less than 100, new infections were growing daily.
“The cases are scattered all over the Klang Valley, and have spread to all districts except for Sabak Bernam.
"We cannot wait for all zones to turn to red from yellow, and only then implement the conditional MCO. If the case had been concentrated in one district, a targeted enhanced MCO would suffice. But because it is spread out, it is difficult to curb the spread.
"Controlling the district borders within Selangor and the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur is also not easy. The best move to break the chain of infection is to implement a conditional MCO for the entire state, ” he said.
Dr Noor Hisham said that it was challenge for the ministry and the government to strike a balance between life and livelihood.
“So we mitigate the situation with the conditional MCO. We allow the economic sector to function, but we restrict movement for social activities, education and sports.
“We hope this will strike a right balance. Hopefully, our actions will bear fruit in two or three weeks time and we will continue to monitor the situation closely, ” he said.
We hope that this "balance" works too and numbers of new infections will start going down.
Let's do our part to flatten the curve guys.