Minister of Defence Ismail Sabri and Director-General of Health Dr. Noor Hisham held a joined conference earlier this evening to address the latest MCO 3.0 status. 

To start, Sabri mentioned the success of MCO 1.0 which has allowed drastic improvement in terms of the decrease in cases, which influenced the government's decision to loosen the restrictions and devised a transition towards CMCO, which then eventually evolved into RMCO. 

During the conference, Sabri admitted that the Sabah election was the primary cause of the aggressive spike in cases beginning of January, which was then made even worse by the reopening of schools by the month of March. Other causes include the detection of new variants, specifically:

1. The UK Variant

2.  The South African Variant

3. The Indian Varian

4. The Resilient Variant

Health DG Hisham then mentioned that hospitals throughout Malaysia are almost at their full capacity, where beds are beginning to be scarce. When asked, "Why isn't MCO 1.0 being implemented?" seeing how it was successful the first time— Sabri answered that while MCO 1.0 had been successful, the economy suffered as a result. Many small business operators had to close down, people were fired, etc and therefore it wouldn't be wise to repeat such SOPs in the current climate. 

Another reporter asked, "Does this mean the state of emergency declared a while ago has failed?" To which DG Hisham replied that if it wasn't implemented, elections would have needed to be held, and the government was trying to avoid the Sabah Election nightmare to repeat itself which was why the state of emergency had to be declared. 

Lastly, updated SOPs will soon be up on the MKN website, so Malaysians are advised to keep checking.