On Sunday 10 October 2021 at midnight, the Malaysian
government removed prohibitions and roadblocks stopping interstate travel.
The occasion was Malaysia reaching full vaccination of 90% of its adult population. Immunisation of adolescents and the remaining unvaccinated adults is continuing.
Malaysia also removed its requirement for travellers to have applied for and been granted a MYTravelPass to cross the international border and enter Malaysia.
The
current testing procedure of the population by the Malaysian Ministry of
Health is not entirely clear from now into the future. The Malaysian MoH (aka KKM, its abbreviation in Melayu) is testing symptomatic people and close contacts of infected people. MoH encourages the general population to buy price-controlled antigen rapid test kits (the MoH has approved particular brands and these RTKs are available over the counter at pharmacies) and report positive results to MoH.
As a Third World economy, albeit one with aspirations, The MoH never conducted massive random testing. The positivity rate of its testing varied from 10% to
single digit percentages (e.g. 3%).
Members of the general public generally held a possibly well-founded belief that as few as 50% of asymptomatic but infected persons made themselves available for testing and isolation.
The Malaysian MoH publishes on its websites data covering new cases, ICU usage, the effective reproduction rate of the virus (R subscript 0; aka R subscript eff) and so on.
Published data include weekly confirmed infections since February 2020 and the fit of recent confirmed new cases to the epidemiological model on which the MoH and policymakers depended.
In the latest graphic of the SEIR model, the orange area under the curve represents the expected number of cases were a significant number of people not to follow the government-recommended operating procedures (physical distancing, mask wearing, crossing state borders and, earlier, crossing county borders). The light blue curve and the area so coloured represent the SEIR model's prediction of confirmed new case numbers if the population followed government-decreed Standard Operating Procedures. The grey bars represent new cases confirmed by MoH tests.