“The President must directly lead COVID-19 handling,” Pandu Riono of the University of Indonesia told The Jakarta Post on Saturday.

Pandu said the current strategy, carried out under the national COVID-19 task force, had not been effective in curbing coronavirus transmission.

Therefore, he argued, the President, as the head of state, must directly preside over COVID-19 management to help flatten the curve of transmission.

“No country but Indonesia has established a COVID-19 task force. There should be no more task force. The government, with all its ministries, must take on the task in order to be effective,” Pandu said.

This week, the country has seen an increase in COVID-19 cases on four separate occasions, including three consecutive days.

Indonesia’s daily case count first topped 4,000 on Sept. 19, before climbing to 4,176 on Monday, 4,465 on Wednesday, 4,634 on Thursday and 4,823 on Friday.

There were 3,874 new cases on Sunday, bringing the country's total number of infections to 275,213, according to the Health Ministry.

The ministry added that there were 78 more deaths, bringing the death toll to 10,386. The total number of recovered patients has also increased to 203,014.

Meanwhile, the actual COVID-19 death toll in Indonesia could be three times the reported figure, which reached 10,105 on Thursday.

Dicky Budiman, an epidemiologist at Griffith University Australia, said that Indonesia had the highest number of COVID-19 deaths of any ASEAN country and that that the nation placed third in COVID-19 deaths among Asian countries.

According to Dicky, the death toll is a valid indicator of COVID-19 management in certain countries and regions.

But he said Indonesia’s actual death toll could be three times the reported number.

“Indonesia should refer to the WHO [World Health Organization] definition of a COVID-19 death and should implement it in the country for our own sake,” Dicky said, as quoted by kompas.com on Friday.

According to the WHO, a COVID-19 death is defined for monitoring purposes as a death resulting from a clinically compatible illness in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case unless there is a clear alternative cause of death that cannot be related to COVID-19, for example, trauma.

There should be no period of complete recovery from COVID-19 between the illness and death. A death due to COVID-19 may not be attributed to another disease, such as cancer, and should be counted independently of preexisting conditions that are suspected of triggering a severe case of COVID-19.

Dicky said Indonesia’s more than 10,000 deaths were ones those that were confirmed.

“Meanwhile, we do not count [the deaths of people with] probable or suspected statuses. If we count them all, we might see three times as many,” he added. (dpk)