Commentary by Jeyakumar Devaraj
“The first aspect and the precipitating cause of this crisis is the Covid-19 pandemic that is sweeping the world. The pandemic is causing a massive overload on the medical services even in the richest countries in the world...
“The first aspect and the precipitating cause of this crisis is the Covid-19 pandemic that is sweeping the world. The pandemic is causing a massive overload on the medical services even in the richest countries in the world...
“The second aspect of the crisis is that many Malaysians in the B40 and M40 groups, especially daily rated workers and small business people have already run out of their meagre savings after 10 days of the Movement Control Order (MCO) and are already having difficulty in providing food for their families...
“The third aspect of the problem is that our small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) which employ about 65percent of our workforce are seriously under threat. The lockdown means that the vast majority of these SMEs have had no income since March 18.
“Given this bleak scenario, several measures have to be implemented quickly to address each aspect of the crisis. The capacity of our health care system to respond to the Covid 19 epidemic has to be bolstered, measures to ensure that the poorer 50% of our population have access to food and other basic necessities have to be rolled out and another set of measures to ensure that as many as possible of our SMEs are kept viable so that they can provide employment to the rakyat when we are able to restart the economy.”
Read here (Malaysiakini, March 29, 2020)
