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Indonesia reports first Omicron deaths
The government remains optimistic that the worst-case scenario can be avoided in the coming months, especially leading toward public holidays, when mobility is expected to rise.
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A health worker prepares to administer a dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine at a makeshift clinic at the Aceh Museum in Banda Aceh on Jan. 17. (AFP/Chaideer Mahyuddin)
M
ore than a month after the Omicron variant was first discovered in the country, the highly transmissible but less fatal variant has claimed its first fatality amid an uptick in COVID-19 cases, prompting calls for the government to expedite vaccination of the elderly.
Health Ministry spokesperson Siti Nadia Tarmizi told The Jakarta Post on Sunday that the country’s first two Omicron-related deaths were a 64-year-old man and a 54-year-old woman with “severe comorbidities”.
The man, Nadia said, was a local transmission case and died in Sari Asih Hospital in Ciputat, on the outskirts of Jakarta, while the woman was an imported case. She recently traveled to the Netherlands and was believed to have contracted the virus there before testing positive upon returning to Indonesia. She died at the Sulianti Saroso Infectious Diseases Hospital in North Jakarta.
“He was unvaccinated and had been diagnosed with hypertension and kidney complications, while the woman, although vaccinated, had severe diabetes,” Nadia said.
Indonesia’s first two Omicron-related deaths came amid a national uptick in COVID-19 figures, with the country reporting 3,200 new cases on Saturday, the highest in over four months. It remains unclear how many of the cases are Omicron infections.
By Saturday, the tally of Omicron cases was 1,161 since the first case was reported in mid-December.
COVID-19 task force spokesperson Wiku Adisasmito said on Thursday, without revealing whether the cases were of Omicron or Delta or any other variants, that Indonesia had reported an increasing number of coronavirus cases in the past three weeks, or since the start of the year. Active cases, he said, had also jumped to 8,600 cases last week, compared to only 5,400 cases a week before.
