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Indonesia sees another daily record in COVID-19 cases as death toll tops 1,000
Indonesia has reported yet another daily record in new confirmed COVID-19 cases.
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Achmad Yurianto, the government's spokesperson for COVID-19, gives a press statement at the Executive Office of the President in Jakarta on March 11. (Antara/Sigid Kurniawan)
I
ndonesia reported yet another record high of new confirmed COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, with the Health Ministry announcing 689 new cases.
The record comes only three days after its previous high of 533 new cases on Saturday, which in turn was only three days after the high of 484 new cases on May 5.
The death toll has exceeded 1,000, despite government officials’ earlier claims that the country’s curve of new cases had “flattened”.
Wednesday’s rise brings the government’s headline figure of confirmed COVID-19 cases to 15,438, the Health Ministry’s disease control and prevention director general, Achmad Yurianto, said in his daily press briefing. He added that 21 more people had died of the disease, bringing the death toll to 1,028.
"Meanwhile, the number of recovered [patients] has increased by 224, bringing the total number to 3,287," he said.
Jakarta continues to be the hardest-hit province with 5,554 confirmed cases and 449 deaths, followed by East Java with 1,722 cases and 163 deaths, and West Java with 1,556 cases and 98 deaths.
Indonesia's COVID-19 task force announced last week that the number of new coronavirus cases in the country had declined by 11 percent, although government updates showed some rises in daily cases.
Experts, however, have been skeptical of the government's claims. They said Indonesia's low testing capacity--fewer than 1,600 tests a day since the country reported its first cases on March 3--made it likely that many cases were unreported.
Indonesia has conducted 169,195 PCR tests across the country as of Wednesday, a rate of about 628 tests per million people. Meanwhile, neighboring countries Singapore and Malaysia have carried out more than 30,000 and 7,500 per million people, respectively.
