While it has no ready answer for this exceptionalism, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo ordered a meeting between the Health Ministry and the Office of the Coordinating Political, Legal and Security Affairs Minister on Friday to discuss how far the country of 270 million people has prepared when the day Indonesia has its first confirmed case of the new coronavirus flu.

Given how rapid the virus is spreading around the world, the first Indonesia case could immediately multiply many times over in a short time.

By Sunday, more than 37,500 people in 28 countries have been infected and the number keeps growing. China, where the virus was first detected, leads with 99 percent of the cases. Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam and Australia — all of whom share borders with Indonesia — have been affected.

The meeting discussed designating one of the thousands of uninhabited islands for a quarantine hospital facility to accommodate patients with highly infectious diseases. While this appears to be more of a long-term plan, the plan may have to be put in place sooner should the coronavirus reach Indonesia.

Indonesia is the world’s largest archipelagic nation with more than 17,000 islands. In the past, it has designated entire islands for different purposes. Buru Island in Maluku province was designated a penitentiary island in the early 1970s for suspected communists and their sympathizers. Galang Island in the Riau Islands was opened to take refugees from Indochinese countries escaping the Vietnam War in the mid-1970s.

The hospital island would likely be located near a military base, Coordinating Political, Legal and Security Affairs Minister Mahfud MD told reporters after the meeting.

Some 243 Indonesians are currently being quarantined in the South China Sea frontier Natuna Island, home to a naval base. They had earlier been flown from Wuhan in China and are likely to spend two weeks there before given the clearance to return to their respective homes.

The government has also answered skeptics who feared that Indonesia’s defiance may have been due to its inability to detect the virus and that the new coronavirus has hit the country, just that no one knows it.

The Health Ministry has stressed that Indonesia acquired the World Health Organization approved tool kits to test the new coronavirus at the first sign of an outbreak in December.

The government has checked on more than 40 people who showed symptoms. Samples sent to the Health Ministry's Health Research and Development Agency (Balitbangkes) in Jakarta all tested negative.

The Sulianti Saroso Infection Hospital in Jakarta has been designated as the main referral hospital, but it is joined by 100 other hospitals around the country that were previously used during the bird flu epidemic.

University of Indonesia (UI) microbiology expert Amin Soebandrio caused a commotion last week when he was quoted by the Sydney Morning Herald as saying that Indonesia did not have the reagents needed for hospital labs to prove the presence of the new coronavirus. His statement was immediately contradicted by the Health Ministry.

On Friday, Amin told The Jakarta Post that the government was handling the suspected patients appropriately, adding that coronavirus tests had to be done carefully.

“There is still no infection case and the Balitbangkes can still handle suspected patients that need to be tested,” he said.

Should there be an outbreak, Indonesia could rely on two other regional health laboratories, respectively in Surabaya, East Java, and Makassar, South Sulawesi, to back up the national laboratory in testing samples.

Airlangga University biochemist and microbiologist Chairul Anwar Nidom said the government should increase the nation’s capacity to anticipate a potential coronavirus pandemic.

Every hospital should have an isolation facility so that initial care could be available locally, he said, stressing the need to reduce reliance on a few referral hospitals.

Chairul said hospitals should not release suspected patients too quickly after they had been declared negative.

“The hospital’s job is to ensure that its patients are healthy, not just to test them,” he said. (mfp)

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