The Ministry of Health (MoH) has removed the pre-departure COVID-19 testing mandate for travellers abound to Langkawi, effective from 12 October onwards. The new policy is being implemented just days after the government lifted the ban on interstate travels earlier this week.
Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin said that this was decided due to the extremely low rate of infection detected among Langkawi tourists. According to the minister, since the travel bubble was initiated on 16 September, only 216 out of 54,341 tourists tested positive during screening, which translates to a 0.4% positivity rate. “The travel bubble initiative also had produced no COVID-19 clusters in Langkawi,” said Khairy.
Naturally, the fully vaccinated requirement for adults still remains. While self-testing is not mandatory anymore, Khairy highly encourages people to be self-disciplined and go for testing anyways, as the Health Director-General Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah has previously advised.
KTMB also does not require testing to be done as it resumes all ETS routes, but will be enforcing the requirement for full vaccination. However, fully vaccinated Malaysians that are coming from overseas will still need to undergo an RT-PCR test three days before they depart and are required to be under quarantine for 14 days.
(Source: MoH / Twitter. Images: KJ / Facebook, Cheon Fong Liew / Flickr – used under Creative Commons licence.)
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