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Almost all Indonesians have antibodies against COVID-19, blood survey shows
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A woman (left) reacts while receiving a Pfizer booster vaccine for COVID-19 in Jakarta, on March 29. (AFP/Adek Berry)
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lmost all Indonesians have developed antibodies against COVID-19, according to the latest serosurvey conducted by the Health Ministry and the School of Public Health at the University of Indonesia in July.
Researchers examined blood samples from 20,501 people in 100 cities across the archipelago and found that around 98.5 percent of them had antibodies against the virus, due to vaccination or past infections.
The figure is almost 10 percentage points higher than the 87.8 percent recorded in a previous survey in December which involved the same respondents.
One of the researchers, Muhammad N. Farid, said the average antibody titer found in the respondents also increased fourfold compared with the December blood survey, from 444 units per milliliter to 2,097 units.
"This is due to the fact that there's an increase in people who’ve been vaccinated and who contracted COVID-19 in the past six months," Farid said in a press conference on Thursday.
He explained that in December of last year, roughly 30 percent of Indonesia's targeted 208 million population had not received COVID-19 vaccines, while last month only some 18 percent had not been inoculated.
The proportion of people who have received booster shots has also significantly increased as well, from 0.5 percent in December to 22.5 percent in July.
