Government's Big Task, Charta Politica Survey Reveals 43.3 Percent Of Residents Don't Believe In The Release Of COVID-19 Data

ILLUSTRATION/UNSPLASH

JAKARTA - The survey institute Charta Politica Indonesia released the results of a survey on public confidence in data on COVID-19 cases that the government regularly releases.

As a result, 53.1 percent of respondents stated that they really believed and quite trusted the government's COVID-19 data. Meanwhile, 43.3 percent stated that they did not believe it and did not believe it at all. Then, 3.7 percent did not answer.

Yunarto admitted that there are still more people who believe in COVID-19 data. However, the number of disbelievers is also quite a lot.

"The figure of 43.3 percent, with 37.1 percent lacking confidence and 6.2 not believing at all, indicates that there is a gap. There are questions about every government data release", Yunarto said in a virtual survey presentation, Thursday, August 12.

Yunarto considered one of the factors that caused distrust of the government in releasing COVID-19 data because the death rate was excluded from the COVID-19 handling indicators in each region.

The government's reason is that the issuance of mortality figures from indicators for determining the level of assessment for handling the pandemic is carried out because many regions have been late in reporting cases of COVID-19 deaths over the past few weeks.

In fact, according to Yunarto, the central government's response in responding to data delays by issuing death rates is not a wise thing. What the government should have done is to try to improve the reporting of the data without removing the death rate from the indicators.

"This reason is not a reason that can be argued, but rather there is an accumulation of data that makes misinterpretation. If the reporting is wrong, why should the data be removed? Why not improve the reporting system?", said Yunarto.

"Learning from the experiences of other countries, heads of government or stakeholders who underestimated the data that occurred in the United States during the time of Donald Trump actually caused negative sentiment from the public", he continued.

This problem, said Yunarto, is the Government's Big Task. Supposedly, the government can make the whole community believe by recording COVID-19 data which is the basis for handling the pandemic.

"I think this is one of the big homework for all stakeholders, both the COVID-19 Task Force, the Palace, as well as the regional government to build greater trust related to the level of trust in COVID data from the government", Yunarto explained.

For information, this survey was conducted in the range of 12 to 20 July 2021. The sample was selected completely at random using the multistage random sampling method.

Respondents who took part in the survey were 1,200 people with a margin of error of around 2.83 percent at a confidence level of 95 percent.