Minister Of Health Reminds Public Officials To Handle Pandemic: It's Normal To Get Criticized If We Make A Little Mistake

Minister of Health Budi Gunadi Sadikin (Photo: ANTARA)

JAKARTA - Minister of Health Budi Gunadi Sadikin appreciated public officials, both regional heads to the ranks of the National Armed Force (TNI) and the National Police (Polri), who tried to deal with criticism in dealing with the pandemic.

He conveyed this especially to public officials in Java and Bali, which a month ago experienced a spike in COVID-19 cases. However, the current situation in the handling of cases is under control.

"I appreciate the regional heads, especially in Java and Bali, who have worked very hard to deal with all the criticisms and so on in dealing with this pandemic", Budi said in a YouTube video broadcast by the Presidential Secretariat, Monday, August 2.

Budi understands that the public official has worked hard to reduce cases. However, Budi admitted that there were reproaches pinned to them. Budi asked public officials to face this reproach with grace.

"We, as public officials, whatever we do, if it's good, just let it go, that's extraordinary. But if we make a little mistake, we will definitely get reprimands, reproaches, insults. That's a normal thing", said Budi.

On this occasion, Budi also explained that when cases spiked some time ago, the highest daily cases did not reach the figures predicted by the government.

It is known that when cases began to increase a month ago, the government prepared a scenario for handling the pandemic until the daily cases reached 70.000 per day.

"The worst case scenario, we previously estimated 70 thousand additional cases per day, until now we see we are grateful that it happened at 57.000 per day", he said.

In fact, Budi said the daily case record, which was still below the predicted figure, occurred when the government had increased the number of testing or examination of specimens every day.

"That's with an extraordinary increase in testing. What we used to do on average was 60 thousand to 70 thousand tests (per day), now it has reached 200 thousand, even for testing specimens it has almost 300 thousand per day", he said.