3 Cakada Died, Epidemiologist: Strong Indication Of The 2020 Pilkada To Cause The COVID-19 Transmission Cluster

COVID-19 illustration (Pixabay)

JAKARTA - The continuation of the 2020 Regional Head Elections (Pilkada) during the pandemic is in the public spotlight. Moreover, currently there are 3 candidates for regional head (cakada) who have died. They are the candidate for the district head of Berau, Muharram, who died before the appointment; candidate for mayor of Bontang Adi Dharma; and candidate for district head of Central Bangka Ibnu Soleh.

Seeing this incident, an epidemiologist from Australia's Griffith University, Dicky Budiman said, the government should not have to wait for the implementation of the December 9 Pilkada to begin to see the impact.

According to him, the death of the 3 candidates for regional heads should be a strong indication that the general election in the midst of this pandemic will have an impact on public health.

"Actually, the current strong indications have shown that the pilkada has the potential to cause not only clusters but to become a double burden or triple burden for the regions that run it. Because we see, there are already infected candidates and some even die," said Dicky when contacted by VOI , Monday, October 5.

With the prospective regional head who died, he said, the government should be more serious about preventing the pilkada cluster than before.

"Because remember, one case of death should have been a sign of something serious," he said.

Furthermore, Dicky regretted the existence of an expression from a minister for some time who said, the 2020 Pilkada did not affect the transmission of the COVID-19 case. He also highlighted the minister's statement, which said this was proven by the high number of cases in DKI Jakarta even though this region did not hold a five-year democratic party.

The minister he meant was the Coordinating Minister for Political, Legal and Security Affairs (Menko Polhukam) Mahfud MD . It is known, in a press conference that was broadcast online, the former Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court mentioned that the 2020 Pilkada did not affect the increase in COVID-19 cases in Indonesia. According to him, the addition of COVID-19 cases in Indonesia is more based on people's attitudes in implementing health protocols.

He gave an example of DKI Jakarta Province. Mahfud said, the province led by Governor Anies Baswedan did not hold regional head elections but the number of COVID-19 transmission was so high that it even won the highest number of transmission.

"In DKI where there is no regional election, the infection rate is high, it always becomes the 1st winner, the highest transmission rate," said Mahfud, Friday, October 2.

In addition, Mahfud also claimed that there was a reduction in the red zone for the regions that will run the Pilkada. "From 45 regions to 29 regions, while in areas where there are no pilkadanya red zones, the red zone increases from 25 to 33," he said.

From that data, Mahfud said the regional elections were not the cause of the increase in cases. Because, a more important issue is increasing public awareness in complying with health protocols.

According to Dicky, what Mahfud conveyed was a statement that was premature and not based on strong and valid arguments from the epidemiologist's data. He considered that this comparison was appropriate if the regions that were going to run the elections had conducted massive testing as has been done in Jakarta.

For the number of PCR testing, #Jakarta is still the winner, followed by #Kaltim , #Sumbar , #Yogyakarta , and #Sulut . Other provinces have made progress and hopefully they will quickly meet the WHO standard of 1000 tests / 1 million population per week # COVID19indonesia . pic.twitter.com/3qmxJYOaJL

- Agus Wibowo (@ aw3126) October 3, 2020

[/ read_more]

Regarding the number of tests in DKI Jakarta, for three consecutive weeks in September, testing for COVID-19 in DKI Jakarta was always above 3,000. Even in the fourth week, the province recorded 5,216 tests and this figure is far compared to other figures. This data was obtained from the upload of BNPB's Disaster Management Strategy Development Director Agus Wibowo, who was uploaded on Saturday, September 3 to his Twitter account.

"So if you want to compare at this time between regions, for apple to apple in a fair first look, it meets the requirements not to be compared. The requirements for comparison, whether the region has met the standard of testing testing after or the equivalent of DKI, there is not a minimum of 1,000 people per week, "said Dicky.

"There are regions that can be the same as the comparison. If it is not the same, at least it is close to being compared," he said.

Previously, besides Mahfud, there were other officials who said that the regional elections would not affect the COVID-19 case in Indonesia, namely the Chairman of the Committee for Handling COVID-19 and National Economic Recovery (PC-PEN) Airlangga Hartarto. In line with Mahfud, he actually said that the highest cases of COVID-19 were in DKI Jakarta which did not carry out the 2020 Pilkada.

"DKI does not conduct regional elections, but the numbers are crawling, increasing. So of course this election is not directly related to a positive increase. However, what is directly related is community discipline," said Airlangga.

Not only that, Airlangga said, the government also continues to push for regional elections to have a positive impact on the economy with the large amount of funds circulating in the community.

"Both the candidates participating in the pilkada and the funds for the implementation of the elections by the KPU Bawaslu amount to Rp. 25 trillion-26 trillion. The cost of organizing it is Rp. 19 trillion to use a lot of manpower who will be involved in organizing it," he said.

In fact, in its implementation which has only reached the campaign stage, in addition to causing three regional head candidates to die, not a few regional head candidates have also tested positive for COVID-19. In addition, there were also Election Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu) officers to KPU Chairman Arief Budiman and KPU Commissioner Pramono Ubaid who had tested positive for the virus while handling the general election stages.

[/ read_more]