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Jokowi reiterates threat of 'warning' to regions amid daily virus surge
As the unprecedented year of the coronavirus pandemic draws to a close and Indonesia heads toward the simultaneous regional elections and the year-end holiday season, the President appears to be running out of patience with the prolonged spike in daily infections.
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President Joko Widodo (right) inspects the emergency room at the Athletes Village COVID-19 emergency hospital in Kemayoran, Jakarta, on March 23. (Antara/Pool/Hafidz Mubarak A)
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meta charset="utf-8">Amid the significant spike in COVID-19 cases across the country, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has threatened regional administrations with a “stern warning” if the rise in infections continued unabated.
During a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday at Merdeka Palace in Jakarta, the President urged local administrations to improve their situation immediately, especially those regions that had been seeing a continuous increase in daily cases.
“I’ve said this before, if we have another increase [in the future], even slightly, [I will] issue an immediate warning because we do not want this situation to drag on,” the President told his Cabinet.
“In certain cities and regencies, we’ve seen increases. Make it stop,” he added.
Jokowi also acknowledged that Indonesia’s COVID-19 death toll had exceeded the average case fatality rate (CFR) for the coronavirus.
Indonesia’s current CFR is 3.1 percent, while the global average is 2.32 percent.
In contrast, a statistical report by the government released on Nov. 30 showed that Indonesia’s COVID-19 recovery rate had reached 83.6 percent, far above the global average of 69.03 percent. The report also said that Indonesia’s active case rate continued to improve.
Official records showed that Indonesia had an active case rate of 16.69 percent in September, which dropped more than 2 percentage points to 14.26 percent in October and then recorded a slight downtick to 13.75 percent in November.
“This means that we are improving each month. Our active cases rate is also better than the average [rate] of active cases globally, which is 28.55 percent,” said the President, expressing his optimism for the nation’s COVID-19 mitigation and control efforts.
Earlier in the week, however, Jokowi said that Indonesia’s health crisis was worsening while warning the public to remain on the alert.
“Let us all be more careful because as per Nov. 29, our active case rate increased to 13.41 percent,” he said on Monday, adding that last week’s active case rate was 12.78 percent and that the recovery rate had declined over the past week from 84.03 percent to 83.44 percent.
“These [figures] have worsened because we saw more new confirmed cases [this week] compared to previous weeks,” Jokowi said.
The President specifically pointed to the provinces of Jakarta and Central Java as recording the highest single-day rise in new cases, citing 1,579 new cases in Jakarta on Nov. 21 and 1,362 ne cases in Central Java recorded on Nov. 13.
At the time of publishing, Indonesia had 557,877 confirmed cases of which 77,969 were active, 462,553 recovered cases and 17,355 COVID-19 deaths.
Indonesia broke another single-day record on Nov. 27, when the national COVID-19 task force recorded 5,828 new cases and 169 new deaths over a 24-hour period to surpass its previous record of 5,534 new cases just two days earlier on Nov. 25.
The last time the country reported its highest single-day death toll was on Sept. 22, with 160 deaths from the coronavirus.
At the regional level, Jakarta still has the highest number of new COVID-19 cases on Java as of last week with 1,436, followed by Central Java (963), West Java (699), East Java (428) and Banten (191). (dpk)
Editor’s note: This article is part of a public campaign by the COVID-19 task force to raise people’s awareness about the pandemic.
