If China and Italy’s experience in managing the Covid-19 outbreak is the vision of things to come, then what we would see in the coming weeks are overworked frontliners in need of technical backup.

It is not just the doctors. The whole deployed government machinery would be pushed to the edge as the country shifts its fight against Covid-19 to high gear. Indeed, even Health Director-general Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah had warned against the inability of our nation’s healthcare system to cope with a super spike in virus infections.

Covid-19 is not choosy of its human host and our government is cognisant of this. We are proudly over-prepared in our curative measures. We have 19,200 beds on standby for Covid-19 patients’ treatment and 1,008 health volunteers on standby to join in the fight. However, since Malaysia is still in its transitional phase to the digital economy, a lot of our methods involve manual labour. This is where we are caught in a dilemma. The same force that
we use to contain and prevent further spread of the virus could also be affected by the virus.

As of April 7,159 healthcare staff have tested positive for Covid-19. Out of this number, 30 were infected while handling patients with Severe Acute Respiratory Infection at the Intensive Care Units and clinics. Earlier, on March 28, a medical specialist in charge of the emergency and trauma department at Hospital Teluk Intan was isolated after having been tested positive for the virus. His family joined him in isolation a day after.

Our frontliners are exposed to Covid-19 in more ways than its mere infection. In Wuhan, China, more than half of the frontliners experienced anxiety, insomnia and depression due to the overwhelming workload caused by the surge of infections. In France, a doctor serving the football club Reims committed suicide after testing positive for the virus.

Having observed all this, and the vulnerability of humans as the new favourite host to this virus, nations worldwide have begun to be creative in using technology to lighten the burden shouldered by frontliners. China has turned its pesticide-spraying drones into disinfectant machines in public areas. Some are used to carry medical testing supplies between one hospital to another. Altogether, this has made both the disinfection exercise and medical transportation more efficient, putting the nation’s healthcare system one step ahead of the virus.

Other parts of the world have made similar moves. New York, for example, has moved to launch a recruitment drive for its Technological Special Weapons and Tactical team to formulate a digital response to Covid-19. This recruitment seeks out professionals in product management, software engineering, data science and other similar areas. Even Ireland has emulated Singapore’s development of the Covid-19 tracker app TraceTogether to allow the government to monitor the encounters of each of its citizens, in the hope of detecting the spread of the virus faster.

While the move to include technology in our fight against Covid-19 could involve a higher cost, we do have the option of turning towards the technological capabilities possessed by our market to come up with what I call “technological volunteerism”. This could strategically complement the manual effort we have called upon to assist the management of Covid-19 nationwide. If we are limiting ourselves to the present alternative of using a largely manual force in dealing with the virus, our move could incur a future cost higher than the ones we are shouldering now.

Already, we are witnessing the effects of Covid-19 on our frontliners, especially on the medical end. In the age of information and technology, volunteerism should no longer be limited to the might of our muscles, but rather, to the reach of our rationality and intelligence. And in the fight against the most defining threat of the modern world history, we ought to give it our very best.

The writer is the Managing Partner of Arthos Sdn. Bhd.