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By Tom Allard and Kate Lamb
YAKARTA / SYDNEY, 20 August (Reuters) – Last week, Luhut Pandjaitan, Indonesia’s minister of maritime affairs and a close confidant of the country’s president, promoted herb-based mangosthan juice as opposed to coronavirus.
His suggestion is the latest in a series of unorthodox remedies proposed in the president’s workplace over the past six months, ranging from prayer to banana-leaf-wrapped rice and eucalyptus necklaces.
The remedies reflect the useless technique against coronavirus in the fourth most populous country in the world, where the rate of evidence is among the lowest in the world, tactile search is minimal and the government has resisted blocking even as infections have increased.
Indonesia has officially reported 6346 deaths from COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, the total number of deaths in Southeast Asia. Including others who died with acute COVID-19 symptoms but have not yet been tested, the death toll is 3 times higher.
Indonesia shows no symptoms of containing the virus. It now has the fastest spread of infection in East Asia, with 17% of other people who tested positive for HIV, expanding to nearly 25% outside the capital, Jakarta. Figures above 5% mean that an epidemic is not under control, according to the World Health Organization.
“This virus has already spread through into Indonesia. What we are doing is essentially collective immunity,” said Prijo Sidipratomo, dean of the Faculty of Medicine of the National Veterans Development University in Jakarta. “So we deserve to dig a lot of graves.” Collective immunity describes a situation in which a giant proportion of the population contracts the virus and then generalized immunity prevents the disease from spreading.
Government spokesman Wiku Adisasmito did not answer detailed questions from Reuters. He said the number of infections was “a warning for Indonesia to continuously improve its redress efforts” and that positive capital-consistent cases in Indonesia were lower than in peak countries. President Joko Widodo’s workplace did not answer questions sent through Reuters.
Certainly, the 144,945 that showed infections in Indonesia of a population of 270 million are well below the millions reported in the United States, Brazil and India, as well as in neighbouring Philippines, which account for less than a portion of Indonesia’s population. But the true scale of the epidemic in Indonesia would possibly still be hidden: India and the Philippines are 4 times more consistent with the capita, while the United States controls 30 times more.
Statistics from Our World in Data, an assignment of non-profit studies at the University of Oxford, show that Indonesia ranked 83rd out of 86 countries studied for all, according to capital tests.
“We are involved in the failure to reach the summit yet, that the summit may arrive around October and not end this year,” said Iwan Ariawan, an epidemiologist at the University of Indonesia. “At the moment, we can’t say it’s under control.”
“NICE STAY”
At the start of the pandemic, the Indonesian government reacted slowly and was reluctant to reveal what it knew to the public, according to more than 20 government officials, control lab officials and public fitness experts who spoke with Reuters.
Despite the increase in cases in neighbouring countries and the fact that 3,000 Polymerase Chain Reaction Verification Kits (PCRs), the WHO-approved control for coronavirus detection, were in condition in early February, the government said fewer than 160 checks had been carried out. March 2.
On March 13, Widodo said the government retained data so as not to “panic.” In the first two weeks of March, the government hid at least some of the daily infections it was aware of, two other people with access to knowledge told Reuters. Both Americans reported that they were later prevented from seeing raw knowledge.
A call through Widodo in March for a major expansion of immediate diagnostic tests would possibly have undermined the country’s testing regime, according to Alvin Lie, commissioner of the Indonesian Ombudsman’s office, an official government control body.
Scientific studies have shown that immediate blood samples, which are antibody samples, are much less accurate than the PCR method, which uses nose or throat samples to obtain genetic material. Widodo’s willingness to use a less reliable product has diverted resources from the PCR, 3 lab managers told Reuters.
Lie told Reuters that fast-control importers, adding up to giant state-owned enterprises and personal businesses, have made “huge profits” by charging consumers up to 1 million rupees ($68), even though check prices only 50,000 rupees ($3.50).
In mid-April, provincial governments reported that there were immediately lots of false negatives and false positives in the provinces of West Java, Bali and Yogyakarta.
But the evidence continued to be widely used and it was not until July that imports of immediate evidence were halted and the government imposed a maximum value of 150,000 rupees ($10). In July, Indonesia also officially pleaded with provincial and other governments that they did not use immediate diagnostic tests in its updated prevention rules and COVID-19.
But Lie said there’s a massive inventory and that rapid testing was still widely implemented, adding workplace staff and travelers to the screen to allow them to move freely for 14 days.
“It’s like saying that for the next 14 days after the immediate test, they are free of the virus. It’s natural nonsense. All of this indicates, and not very accurately, that they were free of the virus when the pattern was taken,” Lie said. .
Adisasmito declined to say whether the president’s call for immediate testing undermined his overall testing efforts. He stated the inaccuracies of immediate testing, but stated that it was useful under certain conditions where the ability to use PCR testing is limited, adding detection travelers. He did not directly answer questions about companies that make great profits from testing.
The central government unveils the national point of immediate detection. But knowledge of West Java, Indonesia’s largest province with 50 million people, shows that it has conducted tests 50% faster than PCR tests.
Government officials say 269 laboratories equipped with PCR machines are in operation lately. However, labs cannot meet demand as infections increase. The number of suspected cases, those with untested COVID-19 symptoms, has doubled to 79,000 in the following month, according to government data.
Part of the challenge is that the capacity of the labs is far from being fully used, according to 4 fitness officers. A senior fitness ministry official, Achmad Yurianto, told Reuters that Indonesia can control another 30,000 people a day, more than double the daily average of another 12,650 people controlled in the following month.
Five lab administrators and experts contacted through Reuters said that the lack of use of the country’s testing capacity due to government mismanagement had led to a shortage of workers and reagents, chemicals needed for testing.
Adisasmito answered questions about the government’s handling of evidence. Last week, explaining the lack of testing, Yurianto said the labs did have enough time to review all samples, with some labs running for limited days and hours.
MINIMAL CONTACT FOLLOW-UP
Generalized PCR tests and immediate effects are to hint at touches of other people inflamed by coronavirus. According to national standards issued through the Indonesian Ministry of Health on 13 July, the tactile search is “the primary key to breaking the COVID-19 transmission chain”.
Reuters spoke to 12 fitness staff members in Indonesia, who described efforts to locate the country’s contacts as ineffective.
Rahmat Januar Nor, a fitness officer in the Indonesian city of Borneo in Banjarmasin Delta, said data on new cases of coronavirus arrived at his workplace in various states of disorder, with incomplete names, inactive phone numbers or replaced addresses for patients and their contacts. , disorders found through fitness staff across the country.
“We asked about the village chiefs, ” said Nor to Reuters. “But in the end, we don’t locate them (the contacts) most of the time.”
When they reached contacts, many refused to get tested, for fear of losing their jobs or being marginalized in the community, Nor and fitness officials said.
The unreleased knowledge of the government organization COVID-19, reviewed through Reuters, shows that only 53.7% of those known as showed carriers or suspects of the disease were tactilely searched by June 6.
Adisasmito did not provide information on the follow-up to more recent contracts, but stated that “they remain weak” and said the government aimed to track down another 30 people according to the positive case. This remains low for other Asian countries. South Korea said in May that it had tracked and screened about 8,000 more people after a guy inflamed by the virus went to a nightclub.
According to five other people close to the case, WHO has informed the Indonesian government that the search for contacts involves at least 20 other people followed by the cases alleged and shown. But Indonesia has an average of only two contacts discovered according to the case, according to provincial officials and knowledge reviewed through Reuters.
In Jakarta, where the epidemic first took hold in the country, knowledge shows that fewer than two contacts were tracked, on average, for suspected and suspected cases in July.
In East Java, some other access point, tracking rates are 2.8 contacts for suspected and shown patients, according to researchers at Airlangga University.
A WHO spokesperson in Indonesia had begun following its recommendations on contact search in mid-July.
“Always in the first WAVE”
Indonesia’s resolve to reject the entire closure was motivated by economic and security concerns, government advisers said.
Instead, he suggested Indonesians wear masks, wash their hands, and practice social estrangement while working, traveling, and socializing.
“The argument that we couldn’t (pay for it),” Soewarta Kosen, a fitness economist who consulted the government about his reaction to coronavirus, told Reuters Soewarta Kosen. “We were afraid there would be social disturbances.”
Widodo’s on the economy is popular, according to the polls. Indonesia’s economy fell by only 5.3% at the time of the 2020 quarter, far less than many other regional economies. But epidemiologists are concerned that resolution will take Indonesia more in the long run, especially since its fitness formula is ill-equipped to cope if positive cases continue to increase.
Dr. Bambang Pujo, a passionate runner and anaesthetist at COVID-19’s main reference hospital in Surabaya, the largest city of the time in Indonesia, said mortality rates in his ward were between 50% and 80% and that there were enough beds.
“Ten hours in a hazardous tissue cover suit is like running a marathon twice,” he said, describing the long hours he spends with the protective gear inside the intensive care unit. “Imagine how we feel. It’s like betting on God. We expect to make mistakes and, if we do, we will be forgiven.
Indonesia has only 2.5 beds of extensive care in line with another 100,000 people, according to the country’s national crisis agency, which heads the COVID-19 working group. This compares to 6.9 consistent with another 100,000 people in India, according to an April report from Princeton University. Adisasmito said the fitness formula is constantly improving.
“We want to know that our infrastructure is not in a pandemic like this,” Pujo said. “Other countries have heard of the waves of the moment. We’re still on the first wave.”
(Report through Tom Allard in Jakarta and Kate Lamb in Sydney Additional report through Agustinus Beo Da Costa and Stanley Widianto in Jakarta edited through Matthew Tostevin and Bill Rigthrough)