Kuala Lumpur: Covid-19 close contacts will no longer have to undergo mandatory quarantine, even if they have not been vaccinated, says health minister Khairy Jamaluddin.
Previously, only close contacts who had received their booster jabs and were asymptomatic could skip the isolation period.
The new rule comes into effect on April 22.
“Now, close contacts don’t need to be isolated if they don’t have any symptoms, regardless of their vaccination status,” Khairy said in a press conference today.
Prior to this, close contacts who had received their booster jabs and were symptomatic had to quarantine for five days.
Close contacts who were fully vaccinated but not boosted also had to undergo five-day quarantine, while those who were not fully vaccinated had to be isolated for seven days.
The quarantine period for positive cases remains seven days.
Khairy, who spent three and a half hours before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) in its proceedings on the development and procurement of the MySejahtera app, also defended the app from criticism that it was no longer an efficient contact tracing tool amid a surge of Omicron infections.
Stating that 45% of those identified as casual contacts during the peak of the Omicron wave late last month tested positive and later went into isolation, Khairy said this proved that the app was still a valuable tool for contact tracing.
“So, to say it has no function (for contact tracing), that’s not true,” he said in response to a question from a journalist.
However, he said the health ministry was monitoring the pattern of Covid-19 infections in the country and would decide in the next week or so whether to continue using the app’s check-in feature.
Khairy also said the health ministry was in discussions with the multimedia and communications ministry to ensure “total compliance” with the Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) 2010 when asked by a journalist whether the government had any plans to review the Act.
The federal and state governments are exempted from the Act.
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