Jakarta COVID-19 Cases Soaring, Just Because Of Late Data?

JAKARTA - There was a surge in new COVID-19 cases in DKI Jakarta on Saturday, December 19. The increase in new cases reached a record, namely 1,899 cases per day.

However, the Head of Disease Prevention and Control Division, DKI Jakarta Provincial Health Office, Dwi Oktavia, said that the figure was not pure new cases that were obtained in one day.

He said this was due to delays in reporting one of the state-owned laboratories in the past week.

"The total addition of positive cases was 1,899 cases, because there were accumulated data of 703 cases from 1 BUMN Hospital laboratory, the last 7 days were just reported," Dwi said in a written statement, Saturday, December 19.

Based on data from the DKI Jakarta Provincial Government Health Service, Dwi said, his party had conducted PCR tests of 15,984 specimens.

Of these, 13,582 people were tested for PCR today to diagnose new cases with a positive result of 1,196 and 12,386 negative.

Deputy Governor of DKI Jakarta, Riza Patria, explained that the spike in new cases in the Capital City on Saturday, December 19 was caused by delays in sending data and accumulating data for several days.

"Then related to COVID-19, there is an increase, which is an accumulation of previous swab tests from state-owned hospitals, yes. So, there is often a delay in data entry," Riza told reporters, Sunday, December 20.

With this accumulated data, the number of COVID-19 transmission in Jakarta seems to continue to increase. Moreover, such conditions cause concern in the community. "Not the result of yesterday but from the previous days," said Riza.

The VOI editorial team also analyzed when this country received an increase in COVID-19 cases to 8,369 cases on Thursday, December 3. And late data is the culprit for the soaring numbers. Read the article "Poor Data Collection for COVID-19 Cases Has an Impact on the Government's Failure to Issue Policies"

A situation like this also occurred in the national scale COVID-19 data update as of Thursday, December 3. At that time, the number of additional COVID-19 cases touched 8,369. Papua is one of the largest contributors to COVID-19 cases, namely 1,755 cases.

Spokesperson for the Task Force for Handling COVID-19 Wiku Adisasmito said the high cases in Papua and even overtaking DKI Jakarta and West Java were not the daily number of cases but an accumulation since two weeks ago or November 19.

"Papua today reported a total of 1,755 new cases, which are the accumulation of additional COVID-19 cases from November 19 to today," said Wiku.

This means, if divided by 14 days, then per day, Papua can report approximately 125 cases of COVID-19. However, during the past two weeks, Papua has often not registered any new cases. Or even if a new case is registered, the figure is often under 10 cases.

In response to this, an Epidemiologist from Australia's Griffith University, Dicky Budiman, said that the use of the pretext of delays in data shows that data integration and coordination has not been achieved properly.

"This kind of reasoning is not correct and is considered to make public trust in the data presented by the government less trusted by the public. We've been 10 months and Indonesia has never reported the data accurately. So, this data problem cannot always be an excuse," said Dicky. to VOI.

The reason for the delay in data input for the corona virus, said Dicky, was to make the government appear ravenous in controlling the pandemic. In the end, the government could later issue inappropriate policies in handling COVID-19.

"If it is not taken seriously, it means that there is a failure to assess the situation and will result in failure to take a solution to this policy which has occurred for a long time and cannot continue," he added.