The Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker collected data from more than 160 countries on measures taken by governments to respond to the current pandemic. The report looked at 17 indicators, including school closures, mobility restrictions, income support to residents and testing regime.

While Oxford said its indices cannot reflect Indonesia’s risk management, Indonesian epidemiologists, who predicted the first wave would reach its peak sometime in the middle or end of June, are concerned that the premature easing might stretch out the pandemic.

On June 1, days before Jakarta entered a transitional phase to the so-called “new normal”, Oxford’s lockdown rollback checklist showed the country’s transmission control had scored 0.0 out of 1.0, while its testing and tracing capacity had scored 0.5.

Transmission control is automatically set to 0.0 for any country with more than 50 new cases per day.

Indonesia has recorded a high community transmission rate in the past months, with hundreds of new cases recorded each day. Starting June 9, the country consistently recorded an average of 1,000 new cases each day, totaling 55,092 confirmed COVID-19 cases as of Monday, the highest in Southeast Asia.

Oxford researcher Toby Phillips said the checklist score for testing and tracing in Indonesia was 0.5 earlier this month, but it had recently gone down to 0.4.

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