News & Reviews:   MySejahtera

Recently, we shared a few essential tech tips for post-pandemic international travel, including familiarising yourself with a specific country’s contact tracing app. Well, that includes our country’s own MySejahtera app, which until today requires those entering Malaysia to fill in its Traveller Pass feature.

However, the requirement will be rescinded starting this 4 July 2022 for Malaysians coming back home from overseas, though it will still be enforced for foreign nationals entering our country. This was announced by Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin through a Ministry of Health statement yesterday.

Just recently, there was a huge personal data leak from a website that was trying to sell information from JPN and MySejatera. Although the website is no longer active, it was a worrying issue that the website allowed any Malaysian to be searched from their IC number to even if they are working in the police/military.

Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin has announced that the MySejahtera app will be reactivated starting from today in order to better deal with monkeypox infections. He further elaborated that travellers coming from countries with reported monkeypox cases will be sent an alert on the app.

Recently, MySejahtera added a new Infectious Disease Tracker feature in version 1.1.9 of the app, whereby it detects hotspots near the user that has infectious disease cases. Now, the feature has been upgraded to provide even more data, this time to include cases of Tuberculosis (TB).

MySejahtera has urged Malaysians to immeditately update the app to its latest version so as to enable the new Infectious Disease Tracker feature. Currently in version 1.1.9, users can install or update the app via the Google Play Store, Apple App Store and HUAWEI AppGallery.

Since 1 May 2022, checking in into a premise via MySejahtera was no longer mandatory but apparently, many people didn't get the memo. According to the Health Ministry's Github portal, at least a total of 4.5 million Malaysians were still checking in on Labour Day. 

The Ministry of Health (MOH) has announced that MySejahtera check-ins will no longer be mandatory in order to enter premises or public areas. This latest Covid-19 SOP leniency will be in effect starting from 1 May 2022.

Last month, we reported on how MySejahtera check-ins dropped by more than 6.3 million amidst concerns over user data privacy. Well, the check-in rates actually went down further since then, as we saw the average for check-in rates on 9 April 2022 being the lowest in 9 months.

As reported by The Sun Daily, MySejahtera averaged about 16.9 million check-ins nationwide on 9 April compared to the 17 million average recorded on 1 July. Moreover, the average daily check-ins at registered premises dropped by 7.4 million (30.3 percent).

Good news to those who are planning to travel! Today, the Ambassador and Head of the European Union (EU) Delegation to Malaysia, Michalis Rokas, tweeted that the European Commission (EC) has decided to recognize the MySejahtera certificate. 

The MySejahtera app has become a permanent fixture for us. It's a way for Malaysians and the government to track possible COVID-19 patients. Moreover, it records our vaccination status, which can be used when travelling.