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Six months on, RI fails to conduct 100,000 COVID-19 tests per day
What is wrong with Indonesia? Why are we unable to conduct a minimum of 100,000 tests per day even after six months after the pandemic emerged?
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ccording to the Worldometers website on Sept.6, India reported a record 91,723 new cases of COVID-19 while Indonesia reported on the same day 3,444 new cases.
Currently, India has 4,202,562, the second-highest in the world after the United States (6,460,250), COVID-19 cases as of Sunday. Indonesia had tallied 194,109 as of Sunday.
Can we assume that Indonesia is doing much better than India in handling COVID-19? With 274 million people, Indonesia, so far, has just below 200,000 cases. Are we in a better position with a small number of COVID-19 cases? How did this happen? Why did it happen?
During the last nine months, six months in Indonesia, COVID-19 has spread rapidly all over the world. As of Sunday, we have 27.28 million COVID-19 confirmed cases and 887,305 deaths all over the world.
It may be misleading to believe that we have a small number of cases. Nobody knows exactly how many people have been infected by the novel coronavirus in Indonesia. This is mainly because of Indonesia’s poor testing capacity. For example, Indonesia, according to the government’s website covid19.go.id, has conducted 30,646 tests from the specimens of 16,897 people on Saturday (Sept. 5). It was a huge improvement from 1,000 tests per day in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But do you know how many COVID-19 tests India conducted on Sept. 5?
According to the Indian Council of Medical Research, the South Asian country conducted 1.09 million COVID-19 tests on a single day on Sept. 5. The US is also presently conducting daily more than 1 million tests.
“COVID-19 has now spread to 34 provinces. We have fewer COVID-19 cases in Indonesia simply because we conduct a small number of tests daily. The new cases will emerge only after conducting tests,” Sanjeevini Pertiwi, who studied biomedicine, told The Jakarta Post on Monday.
“If we conduct more tests, we will have more new cases like in the US, India, Brazil and Russia”.
As of Sunday, Indonesia has 89,791 suspected COVID-19 cases in addition to 194,109 confirmed cases.
What is wrong with Indonesia? Why are we unable to conduct a minimum of 100,000 tests per day even after six months after the pandemic emerged?
“Our testing facilities are limited. Many rural areas and smaller provinces do not have such facilities. The trained manpower to do PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests is also limited,” Richard Sutejo, the dean of School of Life Sciences at the Indonesia International Institute for Life Sciences (i3L) told the Post on Friday in Jakarta.
Richard further stated that countries like the US, Germany, UK and France had developed advanced automated technology in labs so that they could run large scale screenings uninterrupted.
“In order to acquire this advanced technology and equipment, we need a significant sum of money,” Richard said.
So Indonesia does not have enough money, laboratories, especially bio safety level (BSL) II labs, advanced equipment and trained people to conduct COVID-19 tests on a large scale.
Is it possible to conduct a total number of COVID-19 tests equivalent to one country’s population?
Some small countries or regions have already done it. For example, the number of tests conducted in Faroe Islands, Andorra, Monaco, Luxembourg and Gibraltar exceed their populations. Countries like the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Bahrain and Australia may do it in the future.
Given the present rate of testing, which is 5 million tests per year, it may take 60 years for Indonesia to conduct 270 million COVID-19 tests. President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has expressed his dissatisfaction many times about the low number of daily COVID-19 tests. He wants Indonesia to conduct more tests each day to curtail the spread of COVID-19.
Though there are many types of tests to confirm the presence of COVID-19 in a person’s body, Indonesia has been conducting mainly three types of tests. They are rapid tests (blood tests), PCR (swab tests) and rapid molecular tests.
The US government has approved more than 200 types of tests, including antigen tests, antibody tests and saliva tests, to determine COVID-19’s presence in one’s body. Indonesia is heavily dependent on rapid tests and PCR tests. Rapid tests are inaccurate and even PCR tests may deceive us sometimes. Indonesia can learn from other countries’ experiences.
The COVID-19 pandemic reminds us that we need more advanced labs, hospitals and trained medical personnel.
We have just 89 labs, which are biosafety level II, that can conduct COVID-19 tests. These labs are not enough, we need a minimum of 1,000 labs immediately.
We need more hospitals, beds, highly trained medical professionals, skillful lab technicians and more funds for the health sector. The time has come for the Indonesian government to turn the health sector, which has been neglected by the government for a long time, into a priority sector.
