Death Data Due To COVID-19 Has Been Eliminated, Task Force: It's In Line With System Improvements

COVID-19 Task Force Spokesperson Wiku Adisasmito (Photo: BNPB dock)

JAKARTA - The head of the COVID-19 Task Force (Satgas) Expert Team, Wiku Adisasmito, said that the omission of the death toll in the daily COVID-19 report in Indonesia was only temporary.

"The policy is parallel to efforts to improve the national recording and reporting system", said Wiku Adisasmito when confirmed via text message in Jakarta, reported by Antara, Thursday, August 12.

Wiku said that improvements to the system for recording the death rate in each region were carried out for the right policy through valid data.

Separately, the Citizens Report Team from Lapor COVID-19, Yemiko Heppy, said that the public often complained about the accuracy of the COVID-19 report from the central government based on reports compiled from a number of social media sources.

"We have received several reports regarding the accuracy of the COVID-19 data, although not too many in number", he said.

Based on the COVID-19 Report, there is a difference in death data between sites managed by the provincial government and the release of the Indonesian Ministry of Health.

"For the month of July 2021 alone, there are 19.000 death data reported by the regional government that was not recorded by the central government. Where is the data?", he said.

The COVID-19 report also found a number of regions with the largest difference in the number of deaths that occurred on Saturday, August 7. These areas include Central Java with a difference of 9.662 people, West Java with a difference of 6.215 people.

"The difference also occurs in Yogyakarta, Papua, West Kalimantan, North Sumatra, and Central Kalimantan", he said.

Yemiko urged the government not to ignore death data as an evaluation indicator of the Implementation of Community Activity Restrictions (PPKM). "Death data is an indicator of the impact and scale of the pandemic that citizens need to know so they don't ignore the risk", he said. Efforts to delete death data, said Yemiko, are inappropriate actions because death data is one of the most important indicators to see the severity of the pandemic's impact.

"The government is obliged to fix the technical data collection and enter data on probable deaths, not eliminate them", he said.

Yemiko said the death toll that had been announced by the government was actually not enough to know the impact of the pandemic. "The facts on the ground are far more dire than the reported data", he said.

He added that efforts to improve data by deleting reports of accumulated deaths within a week or even a few months earlier have the potential to violate the principle of public information disclosure.

"Removing the death toll is not a responsible attitude for what has happened so far. What is needed is the government to present a regulatory system where the system does not have gaps in data deviation", he said.