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No more milestones
The most grievous truth about the official COVID-19 death toll is that we may never know how many people we have lost to the virus.
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Gravediggers dig graves for COVID-19 victims on Sept. 9, 2020 at Pondok Ranggon cemetery in East Jakarta. (JP/P.J. Leo)
“Nunik Herawati Hudojo was a homemaker, a mother, a teacher and owned a boarding house, a depot and a food stall that served home-style meals.”
The above is the opening sentence in the first article of our “People, not numbers” series, which aims to look beyond the statistics and at the people who meant so much to so many.
Nunik, who died of COVID-19 on Dec. 15, 2020 in Malang, East Java, is just one of 100,636 lives the virus has claimed in Indonesia according to official records on Wednesday, and to all of whom we dedicated the front page of our Thursday edition.
The public health crisis has affected us all in multiple ways, and every life lost to the disease is a national tragedy.
Among our colleagues at The Jakarta Post, one of our senior editors lost a brother and a sister to COVID-19, while another was hospitalized after contracting the virus. One of our journalists quit after months of enduring the psychological and emotional strain of covering the pandemic. Another struggled to provide care for her sick husband and was among the many thousands who desperately sought oxygen for their loved ones.
Many others across both our editorial and business divisions have lost family members, relatives, partners and friends, or tried to console friends and neighbors through their losses by messaging or video call in this contactless, distanced era.
They are only a few of the millions dealing with the onslaught of the pandemic in Indonesia. But that the coronavirus has directly entered newsrooms across the nation, when the people whose jobs are to report on the pandemic end up being stricken by the virus or lose loved ones to the disease, is one indication of how the crisis has afflicted us universally and indiscriminately.
We are fully cognizant of the symbolic magnitude of the 100,636 lives that we, as a nation and a people, have lost.
The most grievous truth about the official COVID-19 death toll is that it excludes many other people who have lost their lives to the virus: They are not even a number, whether due to incompetence on the part of local officials or because of a false idea that covering up the real figure will encourage resilience or make the virus “go away”.
Thousands of people are dying in self-isolation in their own homes with little to no access to the health services that could save them from a preventable death. The bodies of thousands of COVID-19 victims are not even tested with reliable kits that could confirm they had the disease, so their passing can be formally recorded in the government tally.
Perhaps we will never know how many lives have been lost to the virus since Indonesia’s first recorded death on March 11, 2020. It could be twice as many, or more.
It was both sobering and heartbreaking to print “100,636” in black and white as the headline of our Aug. 5, 2021 edition.
Our only hope is that we will learn from our mistakes and do all we can, as individuals, communities and a nation, so that none of us will ever have to face another tragic milestone in our painful, prolonged battle against this invisible enemy.
