Sin Chew Daily

There remain so far five confirmed coronavirus cases in the country, but the health ministry will continue to adopt the procedures required by the WHO and advice from experts in taking the necessary measures to keep the deadly virus at bay.

Like in neighboring Singapore, Malaysia is imposing strict restrictions on tourists from Hubei province, China, and may consider further actions as the situation warrants.

During such a crucial moment, it is imperative that Malaysians work hand in hand with the authorities to fight the virus. Unfortunately, there has been too much of misinformation circulating around the cyberspace, causing massive confusion among the people. Someone photoshopped a news footage in claiming that Malaysia was the only country yet to impose entry restrictions on Chinese nationals, while a piece of viral fake news argued that a fatal case had occured here.

Thanks to rapid advancement in communication technologies, social media is becoming a superbly convenient channel to generate and propragate fake news. It is essential that we filter and seek to authenticate each piece of information made available to us in the Internet instead of blindly swallowing every bit that we are fed with.

This also marks a high time for a handful of irresponsible politicians to rake in political benefits by politicizing and ethnicizing the viral outbreak as well as measures taken by the authorities. This will only complicate things further.

The police and MCMC have already warned the public to stop spreading lies about the novel coronavirus originating from the Chinese city of Wuhan. Offenders could be dealt with under the country's penal code and the Communications and Multimedia Act. For fear of arousing widespread panic among its people over unverified news on coronavirus, the Singapore authorities have for the first time ordered to delete posts by anonymous social media users under the city state's anti-fake news law.

The tentacles of the 2019 novel coronavirus has so far spread to 29 provinces in China and ten other countries on four continents worldwide, prompting the WHO to raise the threat level from "moderate" to "elevated" internationally.

There is now this pressing urgency for the world to cooperate with China to stem human-to-human transmission of the virus, prevent its spread to more countries, take the essential measures to identify, quarantine and attend to infected individuals, expedite the diagnosis and develop effective new vaccines against the virus.

The unchecked dissemination of fake news will only make things much worse, distracting the attention of the authorities and medical experts in battling the virus as they have to quell the rumors at the same time, meaning a waste of their precious time and resources.

It is absolutely natural for concerned members of the public to send messages to remind their friends and relatives to snatch up face masks and other sanitary equipment as the outbreak intensifies. While adopting such protective measures, it is absolutely necessary for us to stay calm and not to be deluded by all sorts of lies and rumors, less so to spread them. We must have complete faith in the measures taken by the authorities.

While releasing relevant information and data on the coronavirus, it is equally important for the authorities to be more transparent and adopt more professional terminology so that Malaysians can have access to more accurate information.