Malaysia enters strict nationwide lockdown as Covid cases rise

Malaysia has gone into a strict nationwide lockdown as coronavirus infections rise

it's the latest country in southeast Asia to strengthen restrictions as more transmissible variants of the

virus sweep the region and vaccination rates remain low while

only essential businesses are open most schools have been closed and people

can only go out for necessities Malaysia has reported more than 7 000

new infections in just the past 24 hours and deaths that occurred in just the last month make up almost half of the country's official death toll. we'll hear some reaction from Malaysians to the restrictions imposed.

I think even with the new restrictions the airports are still open so there's still a potential that covet

can spread while people are struggling under the lockdown the lockdown has been imposed too late

for me it should have been imposed during Ramadan when there were fewer cases

and people didn't move around as much well our southeast Asia correspondent Jonathan head sent us this update well Malaysians are wearily contemplating going back to the very strict lockdown, they experienced in

the early weeks of the pandemic last year it means that to all intents and purposes all public

life is shut down shopping malls are shut people can only leave their homes if

they have to just two people at a time and they cannot travel more than 10 kilometers from those homes

there will be police road blocks 800 of them around the country enforcing these very strict movement control orders um it's bound to have a bad effect on the economy it's a step the government of Malaysia did not want to take and they had been hoping for something of an economic rebound

after seeing the economy shrink by five and a half percent last year but they are dealing with covered case

numbers going up much faster than they experienced last year

to give you an idea uh by the end of last year total covert cases had reached

just over 100 000 in Malaysia in nine months they've gone up now to well over five hundred thousand

in just the first five months of this year for the first-time last month they

experienced more than one thousand deaths this is a trend that is worrying even though Malaysia has a relatively well-resourced health system its intensive care units are not now near capacity

and what's worrying people is how long will this lockdown last it's supposed to

be for two weeks but no one knows given the much higher

infection rates now whether those two weeks will be enough but overhanging

what Malaysia is going through is a much bigger problem which is that it cannot get

enough vaccines to get enough of its population vaccinated so far it's only

vaccinated three and a half percent of the population fully around six percent with one dose

and even that's much better than neighbors like Thailand and Vietnam which have barely begun vaccinating

a lot of that is simply because like so many countries you just can't buy enough

vaccine the Malaysians have been buying from many different sources

this whole region had far fewer infections last year than most of the rest of the world and

here in Thailand and in Vietnam they did remarkably well at containing covid

getting case numbers down almost to zero and they assumed they had more time

they too are seeing very rapid increases in covert infections now

and they're having to build up their vaccine programs

as fast as they can.