Back To Lockdown Basics

So what are we supposed to call it now? MCO²? MCO 3.0 SE? MCO 4.0? 

In all honesty, we don’t really give a rat’s behind.

The nation’s in the worst grip of the Covid-19 pandemic, and it’s taken the daily case count to rise past the 8,000s for PM Muhyiddin Yassin’ and his brainless band of blundering, blathering, BS-ing buffoons in Putrajaya to finally consider a full lockdown à la the movement control order 1.0 of March 2020.

In case it’s not any clearer how deep in the shithouse we actually are, here’s some context. We’ve broken daily case records for 4 straight days with record numbers of fatalities and patients in ICUs. Our infections are rising exponentially (the infection rate is 1.15 and if we continue down our non-SOP compliant ways, we could be looking at 13,000 daily Covid cases by mid-June!).

Plus, Covid cases are sporadic and no longer just linked to clusters; and we’re detecting more of the coronavirus variants of concerns here of late. And if our maskne wasn’t bad enough before, we’re now urged to double mask up!

On top of this, Malaysia’s already way surpassed India in terms of the official number of daily Covid cases being recorded per million people — 215.93 to India’s 157.71 as of May 27.

Wondering why this is so? It’s cos while India’s daily cases are so much higher, it has a population size of almost 1.4 billion compared to Malaysia’s puny 32 million. Not the kind of Guinness World Records feat Malaysia usually vies for.

Details of what this lockdown is actually gonna look like are still scarce for now (surprise! surprise!), but unlike the MCO 3.0 j̶o̶k̶e̶ mess that saw most businesses remain open, this time the gomen’s announced a “total lockdown” from June 1 to 14 – with the exception of essential businesses and services, of course. 

BT-Dubs, when we say “announced”, we mean PDF-ed – the news broke via a press statement from the PM’s Office. So far, and as per usual, no list as to what constitutes “essential economic and/or services sectors” was given by our press-phobic prime minister (we doubt our backdoor lord and master’s gonna consider Parliament essential though, sorry Azalina). 

Perhaps deets will be announced by the National Security Council, Miti, or MCO minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob (who, btw, tried to earn brownie points for the lockdown in the tried-and-tested “I’m-on-an-important-call” social media post), today? Here’s hoping. 

To refresh your memory, the official gomen line in refusing to enact a blanket shutdown over the past couple of months — despite repeated pleas by almost everybody — was the impact it would have on the economy. During MCO 1.0, the country allegedly bled RM2.4 billion a day, or RM63 billion in under two months. 

It’s true many folks, including business operators, daily wage earners and those in the B40 group, would be badly impacted by a complete shutdown. According to Minister Azmin “frog prince” Ali, 2.8 million Malaysians stand to lose their income, so we hope the gomen’s got a plan to cushion this latest blow.

But if yesterday’s Covid numbers alone were any indication, there are over 8,290 reasons why PM Moo’s initial sorta, kinda strict targeted lockdown approach did not work. Especially as our vaccination rate’s nowhere close to reaching that big shiny 80% herd immunity target.

So let’s hope this MCO sticks. Coz while a lockdown certainly doth sucketh balls, catching Covid and possibly dying of it, sucketh way more.