JAKARTA - The Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs and Investment, Luhut Binsar Panjaitan admitted that it is not easy to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic in the country. However, he stressed that the government had made efforts to contain the pandemic.
Luhut said that the pandemic is getting difficult to handle because of lack of discipline in implementing health protocols. In fact, he revealed that there are still people who do not believe in the threat of COVID-19.
"So how do we implement this strategy? How do we discipline the people? Because according to our data, around 22 percent of the people do not believe in COVID-19", he said at the Mandiri Investment Forum 2021, Wednesday, February 3.
In fact, referring to data from the Ministry of Health as of February 2, the total cumulative cases in Indonesia totaled 1.099.687 people since the first case was announced on March 2, 2020. Meanwhile, the new positive cases per day reached 10.379 people. The number of confirmed positive cases who died increased by 304 people and a total of 30.581 people.
According to Luhut, the number of people who do not believe in the threat of COVID-19 could be over 22 percent or even up to 40 percent. For this reason, the government and related authorities are currently tightening various procedures and programs to increase public discipline in implementing health protocols.
"The Ministry of Religion is also involved now. So all Islamic boarding schools, all religious leaders and whether they are Muslims, Christians, Buddhists must work together, we must handle this because this is a real threat, especially with the new mutation", he explained.
The government, said Luhut, did not remain silent with the current situation. Moreover, COVID-19 has also had a negative impact on the Indonesian economy. According to him, the economy will be hard to recover if the pandemic is still in Indonesia.
"The recovery of economic activity depends on how we handle the COVID-19 pandemic. I think this is an important target for the Indonesian government, how can we handle it and yet we can still boost the economy", he explained.
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