JEMBER - Regional Secretary of Jember, East Java, Mirfano, spoke about the receipt of funeral honorariums for residents who died due to COVID-19 which he received reached Rp70 million over the past month.
"In July 2021 we have to take care of more than 1,000 bodies that are not ordinary corpses but the bodies of COVID-19 patients and we have to ensure that not a single body is left abandoned," he said, quoted by Antara, Friday, August 27.
The Regent of Jember Hendy Siswanto and a number of officials within the Jember Regency Government, namely Regional Secretary Mirfano, Acting Head of BPBD M. Djamil to Head of BPBD Emergency Logistics Penta Satria received honoraria as a team for burial of the bodies of COVID-19 patients.
The honorarium received by each official was Rp. 70 million, more than a total of 705 funerals with a nominal value of Rp. 100 thousand for one funeral based on the account code 5,1,0204,01,0003 in June 2021, bringing the total budget spent for the four officials to Rp. 282 million.
This has drawn criticism from a number of parties for receiving an honorarium for the death of a COVID-19 patient with a nominal value of Rp. 100,000 for every funeral activity for residents who died due to the Corona virus.
"In the field, funeral workers have to work from morning until morning again because in July 2021 there were recorded deaths due to COVID-19 on average more than 50 people per day at the peak of the pandemic attack," said Mirfano.
According to him, funeral officials have to deal with angry families and accept physical violence so that at the management level, they must take care of the availability of infrastructure in a condition where there is no available budget.
"The deaths of residents who died from COVID-19 were above 40 people every day which was very sudden and unpredictable, so we had to monitor the cemetery every day until the last funeral," he said.
Every day, he continued, they must maintain sufficient funeral personnel who stop for fear of the risk of contracting COVID-19 and look for carpenters who can produce coffins whose payments are later
"Every night we have to consult with the Regent, Hendy Siswanto, to solve the problem of funeral facilities whose needs are very high, while the budget is not yet available in the APBD," he said.
He explained that at the height of the pandemic crisis in July 2021, his party worked full of risks, starting from funeral officers to the Regent who had to ensure that no body could not be buried.
The former Head of the Cooperative Service said that his party together with the Regent of Jember, the Acting Head of BPBD and the Head of Emergency Logistics of the Jember BPBD returned the funeral honorarium he had received in the amount of Rp. 70,500,000.
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