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Govt urges nonhospitalized COVID-19 patients to stay at isolation centers
The government has urged people to self-isolate or await treatment at its purpose-built isolation centers amid the high number of COVID-19 deaths recorded among nonhospitalized patients.
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A Jakarta public facilities and maintenance worker carries a portable cot on June 21, 2021 to help set up the government-run isolation center at the Nagrak low-cost apartment (Rusunawa) in Cilincing, North Jakarta. (Antara/M Risyal Hidayat)
N
ational COVID-19 task force chief Ganip Warsito has called on people to self-isolate at government-run isolation centers where they could have access to better services, including medical treatment, compared to self-isolating at home.
“I would like to call on the public not to hesitate in self-isolating at isolation centers,” Ganip said during a livestreamed press conference on Monday.
“We have provided doctors, medicines and the necessary treatments [...] so they can recover in these centers.”
He also urged close contacts of COVID-19 patients to self-isolate for five days at government-run centers to see if they developed any symptoms. They could leave the center once they had tested negative for the coronavirus at the end of the five-day period.
Ganip's call comes amid the high number of COVID-19 deaths recorded among people who were self-isolating or awaiting emergency care during the country’s second wave of infections. Independent data tracker LaporCovid-19 found at least 2,700 reported deaths among this group between June 1 and July 27.
Read also: More than 2,600 virus patients have died in self-isolation: LaporCOVID-19
LaporCovid-19 compiled the data from various sources, including the Jakarta Health Agency, civil society organizations and verified information on social media platforms, as well as direct reports it had received and verified.
The government has set up three isolation centers in Jakarta, namely at the Athletes Village in Kemayoran, Central Jakarta, and low-cost apartments (Rusunawa) in Pasar Rumput, South Jakarta, and in Nagrak, North Jakarta.
Ganip said that the occupancy rate at the isolation centers were still low relative to their capacity as of Monday. For example, only 110 people were self-isolating at Rusunawa Pasar Rumput, well below the facility’s capacity of 6,000 beds.
He added that the government had also readied isolation centers in Bandung and Depok in West Java, Tangerang (Banten), Surakarta (Central Java) and Yogyakarta.
