President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has declared that the nation’s COVID-19 control efforts are going well, as the nation enters its eighth month of the outbreak and goes beyond 300,000 cases.
” Let’s judge this based on realities and data, not based upon estimates,” Jokowi said in a video published on the Presidential Secretariat’s YouTube channel on Saturday night. “I can say that COVID-19 handling in Indonesia is not that bad. In truth, it is quite good.”
He stated the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths in Indonesia was substantially lower than that of other countries with big populations. The video showed the case counts of countries such as the United States, India and Brazil, which number in the millions.
He did not deal with the truth that Indonesia’s COVID-19 screening rate stays considerably lower than the rates of those countries. The nation has actually carried out 12,854 tests per 1 million people, compared to the US’s 333,407 tests per 1 million and India’s 57,096 tests per 1 million.
The federal government has been criticized for a lack of openness concerning the COVID-19 death toll. Suspected infection deaths taped at the provincial level reached 12,362 on Friday, exceeding the 11,151 overall verified deaths reported by the Health Ministry on Sunday.
The President called for optimism, saying the country’s economy had actually not been hit as tough by the pandemic as other Southeast Asian countries had.
” We should look at the silver lining so that we remain positive and do not lose hope,” he said.
Jokowi pledged that his Cabinet would work more difficult to discover solutions to the pandemic and its repercussions.
” We need to continue to enhance whatever, and there is still a great deal of work that we should do,” he stated. “We need to continue to adjust policies to find the best ones.”
As of Saturday, the central government had actually recorded 303,498 verified COVID-19 cases and 11,151 deaths.
