Cases Of COVID-19 Have Decreased Relatively In The Past 2 Weeks According To Minister Of Health

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JAKARTA - Minister of Health (Menkes) Budi Gunadi Sadikin said there had been a decrease in COVID-19 cases. This assurance was obtained from the decrease in the number of positive confirmed cases and the number of patients admitted to the referral hospital.

Before announcing this data, the Minister of Health together with the staff at the Ministry of Health have also checked again to ensure that a decline occurs.

"We double-checked this data again with the data in the hospital to ascertain whether the data on the decrease in confirmed cases really happened or because the number of tests has decreased. We see this is the number of patients in the hospital and this is consistent with the previous data shows that it has decreased for about two weeks", Budi said in a press conference broadcast on the Health Ministry's YouTube channel, Wednesday, February 17.

He denied that this decline was due to a decrease in the number of specimens tested, as happened in the past four days. Because he had checked all the data and he also found that patients who were admitted to the COVID-19 referral hospital had also decreased during the last two weeks.

"So the decline in confirmed cases and the decline in patients being treated in hospitals is fundamentally due to the reduced rate of transmission", he said.

There is also a reason for the decrease in COVID-19 cases not due to vaccinations. The reason is that vaccines have not been given thoroughly to the general public.

The decline in transmission of COVID-19 in the community, he said, occurred because mobility had been successfully suppressed through the imposition of restrictions on community activities (PPKM) which had been carried out for the past two months. In addition, the peak of the spread of the virus during the Christmas and New Year holidays has also been passed.

"The peak of the confirmation case after Christmas and New Year long holidays has been exceeded so that the conformation case has dropped. In addition, the mobility since the post-holiday confirmation case has increased through the PPKM program so that it has resulted in a decrease in confirmed cases (COVID-19, ed)", he explained.

"So, hopefully, with this data, we can see clearly that there is already a downward trend from daily conformation cases, and there has also been a downward trend of patients hospitalized daily", he concluded.