Malaysia's average daily COVID-19 cases per capita exceeded India this week and the country's health care system is stretched thin, but the government has resisted pressure to impose stricter lockdown rules over economic concerns.
Malaysia reported 211.29 daily new cases per million people on Wednesday on a rolling seven-day average, compared with 165.28 in India, according to John Hopkins University data.
It has surpassed India on this key benchmark since Sunday, while its daily COVID-19 cases crossed the 7,000 mark on Tuesday and the 8,000 mark on Friday, the highest since the outbreak.
Not only is the infection rate going up but also the fatality rate. Death cases are consistently by the "busload," as the Health Ministry described it, notching between 40 and over 50 a day.
The occupancy rate of intensive care units nationwide is now over 91 percent, senior Health Ministry official Noor Hisham Abdullah said last Friday.
In hospitals in Selangor and Penang states, ICUs are already full and some have had to repurpose normal wards. In Penang, the military was roped in to construct a "field ICU" in a hospital compound.
As the mortality climbs, two hospitals in Selangor resorted to using shipping containers as makeshift morgues.
Malaysia has been grappling with the third wave of the coronavirus outbreak since last September that was sparked by a state election in Sabah in Borneo that month.
Social distancing and mask rules flew out of the window in campaign rallies and politicians and voters who flew from Peninsular Malaysia to Sabah to campaign and vote, return and spread the virus.
In January, a state of emergency was declared, with inter-state travel banned and schools shut. Schools were allowed to reopen in March, only to close again this month.
Meanwhile, large swathes of the economy continue to run as normal even under the latest nationwide "movement control order."
The government announced further tightening of the order on May 12, banning inter-district travel, cutting operating hours of businesses and pushing companies to comply with the work-from-home policy, among other measures.
But it has stopped short of imposing a total lockdown despite mounting calls for it to do so, with proponents pointing out that most clusters are from the workplace.
According to the Health Ministry, out of the current 593 active clusters detected up to Wednesday, 39 percent are from the workplace involving nearly 17,000 active cases, or a quarter of the total active cases.
"If a full lockdown is enforced, the most impacted will be the vulnerable groups and those low-income earners," Finance Minister Zafrul Abdul Aziz said on Monday.
He said 2.8 million people who survive on daily wages or freelancing will lose their income if the government imposes a tight lockdown, as in March last year when it lasted nearly two months.
The latest order that allows most businesses to operate is likely to impact gross domestic product growth by less than 1 percentage point, the Finance Ministry said on Thursday.
Despite risk tilted to the downside due to the implementation of the order, "GDP for 2021 is expected to grow between 6.0-7.5 percent," the ministry said.
But the worst is not over yet, as Hisham warned. Daily cases continue to hit record highs, and 80 percent of the cases detected were unlinked, the health official said early this month.
Malaysia has also been hit with the more infectious and severe coronavirus variants. As of Tuesday, the Health Ministry reported 78 cases of the South African variant and six of the Indian variant.
"The rise of cases started from April 1 and could trigger a vertical surge. We need to prepare for the worst. Please help us to stay at home. Only together we can break the chain of infection," Hisham said in a Twitter post on Wednesday.