Sri Mulyani Explains The Horror Of The United States Handling COVID-19: Big Countries Have No Guarantees

Illustration (Photo: Doc. Antara)

JAKARTA - Minister of Finance (Menkeu) Sri Mulyani said that a big country like the United States (US) is not a guarantee that the handling of COVID-19 will be better than Indonesia. According to the Minister of Finance, this is evidenced by the data collected so far.

"The United States is the country that contributes the most COVID-19 cases to this day", she said during a Working Meeting with the House of Representatives' (DPR) Budget Board which was broadcast virtually, Wednesday, August 25.

In fact, the Minister of Finance called the US to be the leading country that conducted research and produced the earliest COVID-19 vaccine.

"I emphasize that the country with the highest and richest economy in the world, namely the United States, has the first vaccine discovery, but it does not guarantee that it can control the pandemic well", she stressed.

In her presentation, the Minister of Finance said that the cumulative cases of COVID-19 in the US to date have reached 38.3 million people, or equivalent to 11.7 percent of the total population.

Then, daily cases in the US also became the highest with an average of 147.000 cases in 24 hours, or 446 people infected from every 1 million population. Then, the death rate in Uncle Sam's country is also the highest with an accumulation of 646.700 cases.

"Our neighboring country is Malaysia, there are 654 people infected with COVID-19 per 1 million population. Meanwhile, in Indonesia, 61 people are infected with the pandemic every 1 million people. So in terms of the number of people, it looks like America is still the largest and also has the highest daily average even though they are a big country, but this does not guarantee that they can suppress the pandemic", explained the Minister of Finance.

For information, until August 23, 2021, the number of global COVID-19 cases was recorded at 213.3 million cases with an average daily increase of 648.000 people.

Meanwhile, the global death rate due to this pandemic has touched 4.4 million people with an average of 9.682 cases in the last seven days.