Sungai Buloh, Malaysia: Hundreds of junior doctors at state-run Malaysian hospitals staged walkouts Monday demanding better conditions as the country faces its worst coronavirus outbreak yet.
Dressed in black and holding signs with slogans including "equal pay, equal rights, equal opportunity" and "we are your future specialists", they protested at medical facilities nationwide.
The doctors are on contracts for a set period and say their treatment is worse than that of permanent government staff, even as they have found themselves on the frontline of the fight against Covid-19.
They complain of a lack of job security, poor benefits and that very few are eventually offered permanent positions. We want "equal rights, to be a permanent doctor," said a medic at a government hospital that treats virus patients outside Kuala Lumpur.
"We would definitely not be here if we were treated fairly... we should be appreciated for what we do," the doctor, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told reporters. The medic was among dozens who took part in the action at the hospital, which lasted around half an hour.
Local media reported that several hundred participated across the country, but some doctors complained they were threatened by police and senior hospital staff in a bid to halt the protests. Those involved said senior doctors took over their duties before they walked out, to ensure that patient care was not jeopardised.
Malaysia is currently battling its most serious outbreak, driven by the highly contagious Delta variant. Officials have reported over one million cases and about 8,000 deaths. There are over 23,000 doctors on these contracts in Malaysia -- about 45 percent of the total medical doctors in the public healthcare system, according to official estimates.
Last week, the government said it would extend junior doctors’ contracts for up to four years in a bid to forestall the protests. But they stopped short of offering permanent jobs, and the organisers of Monday’s walkout criticised the move as "short-sighted". Meanwhile, Iran’s daily Covid caseload crossed the 30,000 mark for the first time on Monday, its health ministry said, marking a second record daily high within a week.
In the past 24 hours, the Islamic republic registered a record 31,814 new infections to bring its total number of positive cases since the start of the pandemic to 3,723,246. It also recorded 322 additional coronavirus-related deaths, taking the total to 89,122.
Iran’s daily infections had hit a record of 27,444 last Tuesday, prompting the national virus taskforce to close down government offices and banks in Tehran and nearby Alborz provinces for several days. Those strict measures, a first since the pandemic began, ended on Monday morning.
Iran has so far avoided imposing a full nationwide lockdown, employing instead limited measures such as temporary travel bans and business closures. Authorities have previously admitted that the official figures do not account for all cases but those numbers still make Iran the hardest-hit country in the Middle East.
Earlier this month, outgoing President Hassan Rouhani warned of a "fifth wave" of infection fuelled by the highly contagious Delta variant of the virus. Iran has pinned its hopes on vaccinations to help with the health crisis but its inoculation campaign since early February has progressed more slowly than authorities had planned.
Iran, strangled by US sanctions that have made it difficult to transfer money to foreign firms, says it is struggling to import vaccines. In a related development, the Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius has seen a dramatic surge in Covid-19 infections over the past week, but almost all are symptom-free, officials said Monday.
Mauritius recorded 1,067 new cases last week -- about a third of the 3,528 declared since the new coronavirus was first detected there in March 2020, according to official figures. "Cases are increasingly asymptomatic, which has led to a relaxation of controls. As many as 99 percent of cases are asymptomatic," said Zouberr Joomaye, spokesman for the National Communication Committee (NCC), the body in charge of monitoring the pandemic. "Everything is under control, the many quarantine centres are by no means overcrowded and there are no deaths or people seriously affected."
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