A Day The PCR Tests Only 7 Thousand People, Jokowi's Target Is 10 Thousand

Chairperson of the Task Force for the Acceleration of Handling COVID-19 Doni Monardo

JAKARTA - President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) 's order to the Task Force for the Acceleration of Handling COVID-19 to conduct sample tests using the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) method has not yet been achieved. The target given by Jokowi for one day is 10 people.

Every day, his party can only conduct tests on 6 thousand to 7 thousand people. President Jokowi's order has not been accomplished due to a lack of human resources,

"So far, the problem is that the human resources in each laboratory are not optimal and personnel are still limited," said Doni Monardo, Chair of the Task Force for the Acceleration of COVID-19 Handling, in a press conference after a limited meeting which was broadcast on the Cabinet Secretariat YouTube account, Monday, May 4.

Meanwhile, regarding the availability of reagents, Doni said there was no problem considering that the government had just brought in 420 reagents for PCR testing and 500 thousand thousand RNA extracts.

Due to these obstacles, his party requested the assistance of the Executive Board (PB) of the Indonesian Doctors Association (IDI) and IDI in various regions. So, massive testing to track the spread of COVID-19 can continue to be carried out.

"The Task Force has asked PB IDI and all regional IDIs to help provide support so that massive testing efforts can be carried out more optimally," he said.

Doni also conveyed, related to the openness of data to date, 90 percent of the data has been received by the task force from the regions. It's just that, until now there has been no official data on people under surveillance (ODP) and patients under surveillance (PDP) who died.

"ODP and PDP have not been officially reported. Maybe there will be an evaluation from the Ministry of Health and the Task Force," he said.

As previously reported, President Jokowi ordered more Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) tests than before. Moreover, at that time there was already a test kit that had just been brought in by the Ministry of BUMN.

If during the spread of COVID-19 only 26,500 samples were carried out using this method, now, with the new tool, he is asking for more samples to be tested.

"I want that every day, at least we can test at least 10 thousand samples. Therefore, I really appreciate the procurement of 18 rapid PCR test kits carried out by the Ministry of BUMN, which can then be installed," said Jokowi for a while. then.

In addition, the former Governor of DKI Jakarta also asked for data regarding the COVID-19 case in Indonesia to continue to be updated in real time and the information to be more integrated than before.

"Once again, this integrated data concerns PDP, ODP, positive then recovered, who died, the number of PCR (-tests-) how many there are all of them and are open. So that everyone can access this data properly," he said. .