Friday 29 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on May 9, 2022 - May 15, 2022

Reports have emerged in recent weeks about the potential mishandling of the MySejahtera application, a national-level mobile application that was used to monitor the Covid-19 outbreak in Malaysia. These reports caused a public outcry over issues such as transparency in public procurement and data privacy. This is the second of a two-part article that aims to dissect the controversy through several questions. Part 1 appeared in the April 25 issue.

How has this controversy affected the public’s trust in public procurement in Malaysia?

In the case of the development of MySejahtera, while the immediacy of the Covid-19 pandemic possibly justified direct negotiations, questions have been raised about why no corporate social responsibility contract was signed as part of the negotiations. In addition, indications that the government was planning to sell MySejahtera to a private third party also raises questions about transparency, with people urging the government to clarify what stringent steps were taken in the selection and appointment of this particular private company. It is incumbent on the government to clarify the circumstances under which this sale was being conducted.

How will issues raised in this controversy impact our current and future pandemic responses? What are their impacts on social trust?

It is generally accepted that one of the commonalities among the countries that handled their Covid-19 outbreaks relatively well (at least during the initial waves in 2020) included their high levels of social trust, such as in South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam and Germany. In the case of Malaysia, public trust was damaged following the revelations about the possible mismanagement of people’s data through MySejahtera — data provided by Malaysia’s Ministry of Health showed a 30.3% fall in the average daily check-ins at registered premises via the app between March 25 and April 9.

Despite the recent announcement that Malaysians will no longer be required to check into premises or public areas through the app, the recent controversy may leave a bad taste for Malaysians when it comes to other public health restrictions put in place by the government in the future, with people more inclined to question its motives. This means it may be harder for the authorities to encourage Malaysians to comply with future public health restrictions in the event of another pandemic.

Considering the implications on data privacy with the contact tracing app, was the MySejahtera app necessary in the first place and do we still need it?

The introduction of the MySejahtera app was in line with the World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines for control of Covid-19 — test, trace and isolate. 

Undeniably, the MySejahtera app has played a significant role in facilitating the implementation of the nationwide vaccination programme. Hence, the MySejahtera app was necessary during the pandemic, especially given the lack of electronic medical records (EMR) in the public healthcare system. However, we are unable to comment on how effective the app was with regard to contact tracing as there was insufficient information made available to the public as to how contact tracing was actually done.

As we transition into endemicity, the importance of contact tracing will diminish. Instead of relying on contact tracing apps, what the pandemic has taught us is the importance of EMR in preventing and combating future public health crises. EMR allows for more efficient, agile and accurate data sharing across public health systems in order to facilitate better monitoring and reporting of cases. It will also enable for quicker understanding of a pandemic’s behaviour within our population and, therefore, allows for immediate and comprehensive prevention and response strategies.

The government has also acknowledged the importance of digitalising our public healthcare system in the 12th Malaysia Plan. While the move to digitise healthcare is a positive one, the government must learn from the MySejahtera controversy and ensure public procurement is as clear and transparent as possible to protect the privacy rights of our citizens.

Which are among the countries that have successfully implemented contact tracing without the need for a contact-tracing app?

It should be noted that countries that successfully carried out national contact tracing often used extensive data-surveillance techniques to track down the close contacts of positive cases. In South Korea, a law passed in response to an outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in 2015 allows authorities to use data from credit cards, mobile phones and closed-circuit television to trace a person’s movements and identify others they might have exposed to the virus. Information about cases is published online, an approach that allowed the country to avoid broad lockdowns and “worked very well”.

In Vietnam, tracers used Facebook and Instagram posts and mobile phone location data to check people’s movements. Other nations, including Israel, Armenia, Russia, Ecuador and Taiwan, gathered mobile-phone location data to aid contact-tracing efforts. It was also noted that successful contact tracing involved casting a wider net around positive cases, so that second-order “contacts of contacts” were traced and quarantined.

In Vietnam, even third-order contacts were contacted, to the point where an average of 200 contacts per case were found and tested in 2020. So-called backwards contact tracing, in which a case’s contacts as far back as a fortnight are tracked, was also found to be useful, especially when it was discovered that the virus easily spread in so-called superspreader events. Japan recognised this feature early and adopted cluster-focused contact tracing in February 2020; authorities traced contacts up to 14 days before the onset of symptoms, rather than the usual 48 hours.

In the case of Malaysia, the MyTrace system was eventually linked with MySejahtera. The latter started off as simply a way for users to determine their health levels, identify nearby hospitals and clinics where they could get tested, obtain information on what to do if they contracted Covid-19, and where to get treatment.

According to the MIT Technology Review COVID Tracing Tracker, which compiles and compares different countries’ contact tracing apps and the technologies used (including their privacy settings and transparency), Malaysia’s MyTrace system scored poorly, only receiving scores for the fact that it is voluntary for citizens to download, as well as the fact that data collected by the app is destroyed after a period of time. The Tracker also noted that the permissions allowed for data usage were overly broad.


This article was produced by the research team at the Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs (IDEAS), a think tank based in Kuala Lumpur

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