The Health Ministry recorded 31,000 cases of people who had been bitten by suspected rabid animals, mostly dogs, up until April of this year. Of that number, some 23,000 people immediately received anti-rabies shots, while 11 had died. Most of these cases were reported in Bali, East Nusa Tenggara (NTT) and South Sulawesi.

Last year, there were 104,000 cases of people who were bitten by rabid animals, resulting in 102 deaths from rabies, the highest in the past few years. The number of deaths from rabid animal bites last year almost doubled from 2021, when people mostly stayed home during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“[In 2020 and 2021] most people were at home, so there were less [cases of rabid animal bites],” Health Ministry’s Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Director Imran Pambudi said in a press conference recently. “But in 2022, as [pandemic curbs] were relaxed and people started going out of their homes, there was a big spike.”

That was when authorities saw a correlation between rabid animal bites and the coronavirus pandemic, which disrupted animal vaccination programs. This resulted in a waning in the effectiveness of canine rabies vaccines since last year, making dogs more prone to being infected with the rabies virus and transmitting the virus to humans through a bite or scratch.

Imran said some 95 percent of rabies infection in humans in Indonesia were caused by rabid dogs, while foxes, raccoons and rats accounted for a small number of cases.

Rabies is endemic in 28 provinces, or nearly 75 percent across the country. Two regencies in NTT, Sikka and South-Central Timor, have declared “extraordinary health occurrences” (KLB) of rabies.