Thumbs up to Sarawak's Government decision in undertaking tar­geted En­hanced Move­ment Con­trol Or­der (EMCO) that will be im­ple­mented in tar­geted ar­eas

Thumbs up to Sarawak's Government decision in undertaking tar­geted En­hanced Move­ment Con­trol Or­der (EMCO) that will be im­ple­mented in tar­geted ar­eas across the state in lieu of the Move­ment Con­trol Or­der (MCO).

This was mentioned by our Right Honourable Chief Min­is­ter, Datuk Pat­inggi Abang Jo­hari Tun Abang Haji Openg in the press conference yesterday on the decision taken af­ter fac­tor­ing all the con­cerns and risk as­sess­ment which the State Disas­ter Man­age­ment Com­mit­tee (SDMC) has de­cided to main­tain its ef­fort to im­ple­ment tar­geted EMCO op­er­a­tions as th­ese have proven to be suc­cess­ful in con­tain­ing the long­house, neigh­bour­hood and work­place Covid-19 spread.

According to him, the de­bate of im­pos­ing an MCO ver­sus CMCO (Con­di­tional Move­ment Con­trol Or­der) is heated lately. But by im­ple­ment­ing MCO for Sarawak, this will bur­den many in­dus­tries and de­stroy the liveli­hood of many. Our Chief Minister gave us the as­surance that SDMC has done its eval­u­a­tion on the ground and have ex­plained that dur­ing their ex­pe­ri­ence with MCO in Sibu, they were bogged down by a num­ber of is­sues namely in en­force­ment ef­forts.

Sarawak is cur­rently un­der the CMCO from April 13 to 26 in light of the cur­rent trend of in­crease in sev­eral ar­eas namely Sibu, Bin­tulu and Miri while at the same time our Chief Minister had also in­structed en­force­ment agen­cies to tighten in­ter-dis­trict travel con­trol in the state af­ter eval­u­at­ing the lo­cal sit­u­a­tion of in­creas­ing Im­port C cases. Presently, half of Sarawak's 40 districts are in red zone including major areas of Kuching, Sibu and Bintulu which saw a spike in positive cases the past few days.