JAKARTA - Deputy Minister of Health Dante Saksono Harbuwono said it would take more than six months to observe the situation to ensure that Indonesia emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic.
"It's not time for us to call it the endemic phase, but the pandemic is under control. There are several more stages," he said after attending a Hearing Meeting (RDP) with Commission IX of the DPR in Jakarta, reported by Antara, Monday, May 23.
He said one of the parameters for Indonesia to enter a safe phase from COVID-19 was marked by an effective reproduction number (Rt) of less than 1 for more than six months.
Rt is the number of additional cases that occur in the field after receiving various interventions in efforts to control the pandemic such as the Implementation of Community Activity Restrictions (PPKM), COVID-19 vaccination, and other forms of intervention that apply in Indonesia.
"There are several phases of entering the endemic, one of which is when the Rt is less than 1 for more than six months," he said.
Dante said Indonesia still needed to achieve 70% complete dose vaccination for the entire population in order to achieve population immunity from the risk of COVID-19 transmission.
Reporting from the COVID-19 Vaccination Dashboard of the Indonesian Ministry of Health, the achievement of complete or two-dose vaccination as of Monday afternoon was 166.9 million people out of 208 million more target communities.
As an illustration, said Dante, the COVID-19 pandemic is not the first time to hit the world.
"The Spanish Flu pandemic took 2-3 years. Some have disappeared (the virus, ed.) and some are still in the community. But because the immunity that is biologically accumulated and passed down from mother to child, the virus subsides," he said.
In order to transition from the pandemic to the endemic phase, he said, the SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19 must be eliminated.
"It could happen, but it can stop spreading because there is immunity. There is an epigenetic adaptation, there is a change in the genes that the body adapts so that the genes in the body make the body more immune than previous pandemics," he said.
He emphasized that the World Health Organization (WHO) stated that COVID-19 was not yet endemic in the world.
"But it is considered a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). This means that the status is still a concern and is periodically evaluated both clinically and in joint laboratories in the world," he said.
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