COVID-19: Malaysians worried to leave home

The Malaysian public is indeed concerned with the COVID-19 outbreak with the majority of them preferring to be indoors than outdoors.

According to a poll conducted by Astro AWANI on Twitter on Sunday, 79.5 percent of respondents chose to stay home.

However, a small number of 10.3 per cent still planned to go back to their kampungs.

This shows that any plans to spend the current school break with a holiday in the country or abroad no longer feature prominently to the majority of them.

In fact, they are also more likely to cancel or postpone their vacation plans to prevent from being infected by the virus.

The poll provided a clear result that 93.3 per cent of Malaysians said they have cancelled their planned vacation to avoid the situation from worsening.

Only a minority of 6.7 per cent responded that they were still confident of their safety and exposure in the current situation.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which has recorded more than 157,000 cases in nearly 150 countries worldwide, has killed more than 5,800 people.

The high mortality rate is certainly a major indicator of the large number of people who were affected by it.

In Malaysia, 70.2 per cent of respondents admitted that their daily lives were severely affected by COVID-19 while another 29.8 per cent said they were living their normal lives.

For this reason, they prefer to stay home as doing their part in the required social distancing besides economic factors that have affected many since the outbreak of the killer virus.

Subsequently, the findings of the Astro AWANI poll also indicate that these two factors are significant to them, with 46 per cent saying that their intention of staying home is to be wary of the current situation besides managing their finances better.

However, most of them also learned something from the outbreak of COVID-19 by placing the responsibility to keep clean at the top of their priority list.

Some 70.9 per cent of respondents said the necessity to maintain hygiene is second to none while another 29.1 per cent admitted that the outbreak taught them to be concerned about their own health.

The objective of the poll was to look at the lives of Malaysians as to whether they made any changes after the COVID-19 pandemic.

A total of 428 cases of COVID-19 were recorded in the country thus far, with the Ministry of Health registering 190 new cases on Sunday.