Reason For Excluded Death Rate From COVID-19 Handling Indicator: Late Death Case Reported

Illustrations (Irfan Meidianto / VOI)

JAKARTA - Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs and Investment (Menkomarves) Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan, through his spokesman, Jodi Mahardi, explained the reason for the government to issue death figures from indicators for handling COVID-19 in each region.

Jodi explained, currently many regions have been late in reporting COVID-19 deaths to the government over the past few weeks. Late recording of mortality rates has been reported to lead to inaccuracies in determining the PPKM level.

"Many deaths have been piled up, or reported in installments, so that they were reported too late. So there was a distortion or bias in the analysis, making it difficult to assess the development of the situation in one area," said Jodi in his statement, Wednesday, August 11.

Moreover, said Jodi, the death toll issued in the assessment indicators for determining the PPKM level was carried out temporarily. "Not deleted, just not used for a while," he said.

To overcome this, Jodi emphasized that the government continues to take corrective steps to ensure accurate data.

"A data clean-up is being carried out, a special team is being sent for this. Later, this death indicator will be included if the data is neat," he explained.

While waiting for the process, Jodi said that for the time being the government was still using five other indicators for assessment, namely BOR (bed utilization rate), confirmed cases, hospitalization, tracking, testing, and socioeconomic conditions. Public.

The Head of the Communication and Public Service Bureau of the Ministry of Health, Widyawati, explained that the deaths of COVID-19 patients in the past week to a month in the area had accumulated and had only been reported to the Ministry of Health.

As a result, said Widyawati, the Ministry of Health released the daily death rate due to COVID-19 which tends to be high in the last three weeks. The provinces of West Java, Central Java and East Java have the largest contribution to the death rate at the national level.

Widyawati said the delay in reporting updates from the regional government (Pemda) was due to limited health personnel, in inputting data when there was a spike in COVID-19 cases in the region a few weeks ago.

"The high number of cases in the previous few weeks has prevented the regions from entering or updating data into the Ministry of Health's National All Record (NAR) system. We will continue to see anomalous spikes in death rates like this, at least for the next two weeks," said Widyawati.

On Monday, August 9, Luhut stated that the government would remove the death toll from the indicators for handling COVID-19. The reason is because of problems in data input caused by the accumulation of death cases in the previous few weeks.

"We carried out this evaluation by removing the mortality indicator in the assessment because we found that there was input data which was the accumulation of mortality rates over the past few weeks, causing distortions in the assessment," said Luhut.

This reasoning is considered unreasonable. Griffith University epidemiologist Dicky Budiman said the data problem is an old one. The government does not seem concerned so far. In fact, until now Indonesia does not have factual data. In addition, the data collection also does not meet the population scale and the escalation of the pandemic.

"Because, for example, talking about daily case numbers, it's a lot of confusion. From the point of view that the test can't be real-time, it's still there. The test wasn't that day, but how many days later," said Dicky to VOI.

Logically, when there is a problem with data collection, it should be corrected, not eliminated. Dicky explained that the death rate is a mandatory indicator. Eliminating it would have very serious repercussions. Treatment strategies may deteriorate. The impact is disastrous for society.

"The impact is very serious, yes, it means we will be blind to the situation. The mortality indicator is a mandatory indicator. So the pandemic indicator has an early and late indicator. The initial indicator is daily cases, TPR (test positivity rate). If the final indicator is other than house occupancy sick, ICU, it's death," said Dicky.