As of 10th June 2020, we have moved into the “Recovery Movement Control Order” phase. For the past few weeks under CMCO, most Malaysians have been following the “new normal” of strict SOPs when going out. Wearing face masks, maintaining social distance, taking temperature and writing down our details before entering shops, etc. To be honest, it felt like things were already back to normal during CMCO.
At one point the number of positive cases shot up to 277 in a day but it was due to the immigration department clusters, so thankfully those were already under control. Daily cases have dropped to single digits, as of today (10 June 2020) there were only 2 cases (1 imported, 1 local) even with most Malaysians going back to the office already and traffic is getting back to pre-mco conditions.
RMCO lifts a lot of restrictions, some of which are:
- No more mandatory quarantine for Malaysians (or those with permission from Immigration) returning from overseas. Only health check and self-quarantine if needed.
- No more restrictions on interstate travel
- Hair saloons can now operate
Since CMCO, we’ve either been using the MySejahtera app for contact tracing, scanning QR codes, or writing down our personal details at all entrances of buildings and shops. Usually you have your temperature scanned and details taken at the entrance of a shopping mall, and then each shop has their own QR code to keep track of shops you visited.
And so the Ministry of Communications and Multimedia had to issue an advisory regarding the collection of our personal data. Usually we had to provide at least our name and phone number before entering any premise.
Full advisory: https://www.pdp.gov.my/jpdpv2/assets/2020/05/ADVISORY-PDPA-CMCO.pdf
Many small businesses have been struggling to survive throughout the MCO period, many hotels closed down or are now up for sale. A Facebook group of businesses for sale posted pictures of shoplots in kuchai lama with “for sale/for rent” signs. Quite sad and scary to see.
For exam students, public schools will reopen 24th of June onward and for higher education campus is open only to certain students (eg. final year students who need to use the on campus labs etc), the rest will continue with online classes.
RMCO will end on the 31st of August 2020. Hopefully by then things will slowly go back to normal.
