Positive confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Indonesia show an alarming increase. The Covid-19 Handling Task Force reported that there were an additional 5,085 confirmed cases yesterday. The case in Indonesia is said to be similar to what happened in India.
The number of infections increased significantly compared to the previous day which was only recorded at 3,393. DKI Jakarta for the umpteenth time became the contributor to the most cases with a total of 2,485 cases.
Earlier this week, Minister of Health Budi Gunadi Sadikin said the increase in Covid-19 cases experienced by Indonesia was similar to India. Both countries experienced an increase in cases that were not fast but rose slowly.
“Indonesia is similar to India, where the increase is not fast, but slowly rising steadily and we have not seen the peak reached quickly as happened in other countries,” said Budi, as quoted on Wednesday (20/7/2022).
Budi said Indonesia was not the only country experiencing a spike in Covid-19 cases. According to Budi, several other countries have experienced an increase in cases, even reaching 100 thousand cases per day.
Budi asked the public to immediately carry out the third follow-up vaccination, aka booster, considering the rate of transmission of Covid-19 in Indonesia continues to increase, especially for the BA.4 and BA.5 virus variants.
“The possibility of people getting infected is higher even though the person concerned has been vaccinated. So we convey to the President that the protection for hospital admission and fatality is still high,” said Budi.
“It is recommended that the public immediately get a booster because even though there is a possibility of being affected, the booster is proven to be able to protect us from going to the hospital. Even if we go to the hospital, the fatality rate is very low,” he said.
Furthermore, the World Health Organization (WHO) said the Covid-19 pandemic would not end shortly, after seeing the phenomenon of increasing Covid-19 cases in recent times in several countries.
The WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus admitted that he was quite worried about the trend of increasing cases. It is feared that this situation will put further pressure on the world’s health systems and workers.
“There has certainly been a lot of progress. We have safe and effective tools to prevent infection, hospitalization, and death. However, we must not take it for granted,” said Tedros, as quoted Wednesday (20/7/2022).
In recent times, the increase in cases in several countries is due to the emergence of the Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants. Moreover, now several countries have reported a new subvariant BA.2.75 known as ‘Centaurus’.
