Impact of COVID-19 pandemic conditional movement control order (CMCO) on the dengue situation in Malaysia: article

This study highlights the effects of COVID-19 pandemic to our dengue situation in Malaysia. Specifically, the purpose is to identify and determine the distribution of dengue fever pattern affected by the country’s Conditional Movement Control Order (CMCO) and further evaluate it. This is an observational and descriptive research where dengue cases in all states of Malaysia were recorded weekly and compared to the previous MCO. During CMCO, the pattern of dengue fever cases was calculated and observed whether it showed any change after the MCO. The results showed that the overall cases of dengue during CMCO were reported to be higher compared to the numbers during MCO which was only 1395 cases. The highest reporting cases of dengue was exhibited during CMCO Epidemiological Week (EW) 23, which was as much as 1871 cases. In each week of the CMCO period, incidence of dengue did not show any sign of decreasing. Hence, this research work has revealed that CMCO did not help in combatting dengue fever. Despite that, further analysis of variation, mean difference, and nonparametric tests were done to understand the significance. This is essential to understand the density of a dengue outbreak amidst a pandemic, so risk assessment and hazard mitigations can be planned.