PETALING JAYA: A total of 2,236,695 doses of Covid-19 vaccine doses has been administered under the country’s National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme as at May 20.
The vaccination programme started on Feb 24 with a target of covering at least 80% of the country’s adult population by February 2022.
The vaccination programme is being carried out in three phases.
The first covers frontliners.
The second which began on April 19 involves high-risk groups and those aged 60 and above.
The rest of the Malaysian population aged 18 years and above will be vaccinated in the third phase, which is from May 2021 to February 2022.
Here’s how the states and federal territories are progressing:
The following graph shows the percentage of Malaysia’s population who have received at least one vaccine dose, versus others in Asean as well as South Korea, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and Taiwan.
In terms of vaccine registrations, 10,435,790 people or 43% of Malaysia’s population who are aged 18 and above have signed up as at May 20.
Malaysia has bought a total of 66.7 million vaccine doses, enough to cover 109.65% of the country’s estimated 32.7 million population.
The country recorded a total of 498,795 Covid-19 infections with 418,897 recoveries and 1,822 deaths as at May 21.
Among Asean countries, Malaysia currently has the highest cumulative confirmed Covid-19 cases per million people, according to Oxford University’s Our World in Data (OWID)website:
In terms of Covid-19 deaths per million people among Asean countries, the OWID portal puts Malaysia third behind the Philippines and Indonesia as at May 20, 2021:
One of the things health authorities and experts measure when trying to find out where things are headed is the infection’s reproduction number, called R0 (pronounced as “R naught”).
The R value refers to the number of people that a person who has the coronavirus will infect.
If the R value is 1 for example, it means that on average, one infected person will spread Covid-19 to one other individual.
An R value higher than 1 means that the number of cases will increase.
However, if the R value goes down, the disease will eventually stop spreading as not enough new people are being infected to sustain the outbreak.
Malaysia announced its first Covid-19 cases on Jan 25, 2020, involving three tourists who entered via Johor from Singapore on Jan 23.
The number of cases then rose to 22 by Feb 16 last year, representing the first wave of cases.
The second wave of cases began on Feb 27, 2020, followed by the third wave that began on Sept 20.
The following is how the third wave of infections developed in each state and federal territory:
