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Indonesia excludes death tally from COVID-19 curb assessment
Provinces outside Jakarta have experienced soaring numbers of deaths and the government has claimed that the figures are "distorting" assessment on the curbs.
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A child rides a bicycle along the closed Jl. Al-Fathu in Soreang, Bandung, West Java, on July 4. The government recently extended its multi-tiered public activity restrictions (PPKM) until Aug. 16 for Java and Bali and until Aug. 23 for the rest of the country. (Antara/Raisan Al Farisi)
T
he government says it has excluded the daily death toll from the group of indicators it uses to establish the severity levels of its multi-tiered public activity restrictions (PKPM), claiming that the COVID-19 death figures have “distorted” its assessments.
The change was announced on Monday in conjunction with the extension of PPKM until Aug. 16 on Java and Bali and until Aug. 23 in the rest of the country.
Coordinating Maritime Affairs and Investment Minister Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan, who is leading the government’s COVID-19 response efforts on Java and Bali, said the government had altered its assessment criteria after finding that the situation on the ground had improved in some areas and opting to relax curbs there.
“There are 26 cities and regencies whose PPKM levels have dropped from level 4 to level 3, indicating that the situation [in these areas] has improved significantly,” Luhut said at a press conference on Monday.
“We evaluated [the situation] after excluding the fatality indicator from our assessment because we found that the accumulation of the fatality tally over the past few weeks had distorted [our] assessment.”
Coordinating Maritime Affairs and Investment Ministry spokesman Jodi Mahardi said delays in reporting COVID-19 deaths were responsible for the distortion and had created assessment difficulties, as quoted by kompas.com. He added that the government would begin considering the indicator again after it had redressed the data discrepancies.
Luhut said the government would establish a special team charged with bringing down the fatality rate in regions that had experienced surges of deaths over the past few weeks, such as Yogyakarta.
