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Not out of the woods yet
There is no reason to believe that we have won the war against the virus, as the threat of a third wave still looms over the country.
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Health workers administer COVID-19 vaccines to residents during a mobile vaccination drive at the Cipedak subdistrict office in South Jakarta on July 13. The Jakarta administration dispatched vaccination vans to speed up the inoculation drive in the capital. (Antara/Indrianto Eko Suwarso)
I
t is safe to say that Jakarta may have passed the peak of the Delta-fueled second wave that is now ravaging other regions on and outside the island of Java.
On Friday, the bed occupancy rate of the Kemayoran COVID-19 Emergency Hospital stood at 17 percent, down from around 90 percent in June. Also on Friday, the capital recorded 969 new infections, the sixth-highest number after West Java (2,742), East Java (2,508), North Sumatra (1,481), Central Java (1,432) and Bali (1,039). Jakarta was once the epicenter of the virus, with around 20,000 new cases per day when the second wave gripped the city in June.
We should all be glad that we no longer see harrowing pictures of COVID-19 patients overloading hospitals in Jakarta. But there is no reason to believe that we have won the war against the virus, as the threat of a third wave still looms over the country.
We have yet to reach a conclusion on how exactly the second wave peaked in the capital — or which factors were more influential in curbing the infection rate.
Compared to other regions, Jakarta has by far been the best at handling the pandemic. It has a better testing and tracing capacity, the highest vaccination rate and it was among the first regions to impose various forms of social restrictions to contain the virus.
While all these measures certainly contribute to the decline in COVID-19 cases in the capital, questions remain over whether another factor — the speed at which Delta variant infects people — is more determining.
The city’s testing capacity has yet to meet World Health Organization standards, with a positivity rate way above the maximum 5 percent during the height of the crisis. Jakarta may have inoculated more than 7 million people, or 70 percent of its population, many (about 40 percent) were suburbanites or people with non-Jakarta IDs.
