.jpg "MyBig chief executive officer Kong Chia Hing speaks to Malay Mail during an interview in Sri Hartamas December 14, 2020. u00e2u20acu201d Picture by Hari Anggara")
KUALA LUMPUR, Dec 15 — Local biotech solutions firm MyBig Sdn Bhd is building a system to help Malaysia handle the high-volume Covid-19 testing of foreign arrivals and potentially reopen the country’s borders for tourism.
MyBig chief executive officer Kong Chia-Hing said this system would help automate screenings using antigen rapid test kits (RTK-Ag) and reduce the cost both for the government and travellers.
He said this would be a crucial step towards safely reopening the country’s borders, which would provide a massive fillip to the tourism industry that was one of the country’s largest economic growth engines.
Tourism is a sector that Malaysia should urgently seek to rebuild ahead of other countries to gain an advantage, he said when explaining that the solution MyBig was developing could help to achieve this more safely.
“The question remains on how quick can our nation respond to this kind of opportunity? At the same time we need to make sure that our nation is not jumping from the hot pan into the fire.
“We must be able to secure all our entry points with a giant net that we can widely cast to rapidly detect and discern all inbound travellers penetrating our borders,” he told Malay Mail during an interview at his office in Mont Kiara here.
To meet the challenge, Kong said his company is seeking to employ a two-part solution.
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Firstly, it intends to use an instrument with photoelectric sensors to automatically read the results of the test kits, which Kong said would boost efficiency and allow tests to be carried out at a higher rate than presently.
Secondly, a mobile application will be developed to receive the test results directly from the automated instrument.
The application would also double as a payment gateway exclusively for the Covid-19 tests, with users set to enjoy rebates from partnering service providers and merchants as a bonus.
“The automated instrument complements the interpretation process using photo sensors to scan the barcode and results on the test cassettes individually, to aid the manual reading process and avoid wrongful interpretation,” he said.
He said this would reduce the burden on government and government-partnered testing facilities that were already nearing their limits with the testing of Malaysian residents.
Kong added that those in the tourism industry would be keen to provide rebates as a way to attract travellers to their businesses.
Tourism, Arts and Culture Minister Datuk Seri Nancy Shukri said this week that Malaysia’s tourism sector has already bled an estimated RM100 billion so far this year as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We want to simplify the cost, and someone has to bear the costs. It’s either the travellers bearing the costs themselves, or the government, or the private sector — who will be the eventual benefactors of these travellers coming to the country,“ Kong said.
Through this two-pronged approach, Kong said MyBig aimed to cut between 10 and 30 per cent from the RM120 the Ministry of Health (MoH) currently charges foreigners for RTK-Ag testing.
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Kong also stressed that the RTK-Ag testing should only be complementary to the more accurate reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests. He said China as an example of where RT-PCR tests were required of travellers before departing from the country.
MyBig is primarily a biotechnology solutions company accredited by the MoH to develop and distribute diagnostics devices.
Since the government imposed the movement control order (MCO) in Malaysia as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, various restrictions have been placed on international travel.
Last year, the Tourism Ministry reported that approximately 26.1 million tourists travelled to Malaysia, spending over RM86 million.
