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JAKARTA: Indonesia reported on Saturday (May 9) 533 new coronavirus infections, the largest daily increase, bringing the total number to 13,645, health ministry official Achmad Yurianto said.
Yurianto reported that 16 more people died from the disease, bringing the total number of deaths to 959, while 2,607 recovered.
Nearly 108,700 people have been tested on Saturday, he added, while urging Indonesians to continue to obey the order to stay home to prevent further spread of the virus.
Meanwhile, the provinces have blamed faulty reagent distribution, too few laboratories, and lack of experience to prevent them from approaching President Joko Widodo’s goal of 10,000 coronavirus tests a day in the country.
Medical experts have criticized the government for its low testing rate, potentially masking the scale of its Covid-19 outbreak, with only around 50 tests per 100,000 people compared to 2,500 per 100,000 in neighboring Singapore.
According to notes from a meeting between regional health authorities and the Indonesian COVID-19 working group, the Indonesian analysis rate as of Wednesday was 4,000-5,000 specimens per day.
Health authorities in the easternmost province of Papua said there was a shortage of reagents and limited human resources, according to notes reviewed by Reuters.
The Central Java province, for example, was only able to analyze 600 samples a day despite its consumption of 900 samples, according to the notes.
Riau Province said 12,000 reagents assigned to them were inadvertently shipped to a different province with a similar name, the Riau Islands.
Yurianto, a senior official at the health ministry, confirmed the content of the notes and said that there were 76 laboratories capable of carrying out tests, but only 53 were operational, due to problems with access and distribution of reagents.
Yurianto cited the example of how tests in northern Kalimantan on the island of Borneo could not be sent to Surabaya, a city on the island of Java, more than 1,200 kilometers away, which houses the designated laboratories for the region.
“This is a very complex issue. Even when the labs are operational, but (the reagents) are in Jakarta. How can we send them to Papua when the travel ban is still in effect?” he said. – Reuters
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