No ship crew found COVID-19 positive to date - Health DG

To date, no ship’s crew has been identified to be infected with COVID-19, said Health director-general Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah.

He further said that all crew returning to the country would also have to undergo a 14-day quarantine as experienced by Malaysian citizens returning from abroad.

"... if cruise ships, yachts and so on, we will indeed ensure they are quarantined for 14 days.

"But if it is a flight, we have to see if the crew had stopped at certain places, if there is no stop maybe that is what we will be discussing with the Ministry of Transport to look at their activities before we allow them to return home or how they will be quarantined," he said at the COVID-19 daily media conference here today.

On the COVID-19 vaccine, Dr Noor Hisham said Malaysia was working with several countries to produce the vaccine and hoped that Malaysia would be selected as the study site.

He added that while Malaysia did not have the basic capability to generate the COVID-19 vaccine, but did not rule out the possibility that the vaccine could be manufactured locally.

On other developments, Dr Noor Hisham said the Institute for Medical Research (IMR) would focus more on studying the COVID-19 virus.

“We asked the IMR to reduce the volume of tests, so that we hope the IMR can focus on isolating, culturing and studying the virus.

“The first analysis showed our virus is strain B, and whether there are the possibilities of strains A and C,” he said.

He said, as of yesterday, IMR had tested 658 samples from 9,899 samples.

-- BERNAMA