New Record For COVID-19 Breaks, Task Force: It's Hard For Me To Deliver

JAKARTA - New cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, January 7 reached 9,321 people. This figure is a new record since COVID-19 was discovered in Indonesia in early 2020.

Spokesperson for the Task Force (Task Force) Handling COVID-19, Wiku Adisasmito, said the new record cases were the result of community mobilization during the Christmas and New Year holidays.

"The increase in daily positive cases per day is the highest since the beginning of the pandemic, reaching 9,000. In fact, this figure is almost 500 in just one day and this is the result of the long holiday," Wiku said in a press conference broadcast on the YouTube account of the Presidential Secretariat, Thursday, January 7th.

With the addition of these cases, Wiku assessed that the community was still unable to improve themselves and took lessons from the previous three long holidays where at that time an increase in cases also occurred.

"We still have not succeeded in improving and taking lessons from the previous three long holidays," he said.

The three long holidays in question are the Eid Al-Fitr holiday in May 2020, the Independence Day holiday in August 2020, and the long holiday in October 2020.

Furthermore, Wiku admitted that he was concerned about the increasing number of COVID-19 cases. "It's hard for me to deliver this data," he said.

He then hopes that the increase in cases like this should be stopped immediately because the addition of positive cases with a high enough number is very worrying.

"(The increase in cases, ed.) This is a very worrying condition and we need to stop it immediately," he said.

As previously reported, 9,321 cases of COVID-19 increased so that the total accumulation since the beginning of the spread reached 797,723 people. The highest addition of daily COVID-19 cases previously occurred on Wednesday, January 6, 2021 with 8,854 cases.

In addition, based on data from the Ministry of Health (Kemenkes), the number of cases that were declared cured of COVID-19 in Indonesia increased by 6,924 to 659,437 people. Then the death toll increased by 224 to 23,520 people.