Indonesia has more covid-19 cases than any Asian country except India. Several factors have exacerbated the latest outbreak
TRI WAHYONO was trying to keep it together. It was rush hour on a weeknight in late June in Yogyakarta, a city on the Indonesian island of Java, but the streets were almost empty. It had been like that for a couple of weeks. Since the number of covid-19 cases spiked in the city early last month, people had been staying home.
But in absolute terms Indonesia has the most cases in Asia after India. The daily number of new infections has grown eight-fold over the past month, hitting a record high of more than 38,000 on July 9th. Since early July, the country has had the world’s third-highest number of daily cases, taken as an average over seven days, after Brazil and India. But because testing is patchy, the virus is likely to be much more widespread than official figures suggest.
On July 5th the health minister urged those with mild symptoms to refrain from going to hospital. Many Indonesians are taking his advice. Some who stay home are dying. Nearly 300 infected people have perished while self-isolating at home, according to LaporCovid-19, an NGO which collects data on the pandemic. There has been a steep increase in deaths since June, says the World Health Organisation.
Several factors have exacerbated the latest outbreak. The government never imposed a full lockdown, for fear of paralysing the economy and impoverishing the country’s millions of informal workers, who cannot toil from home. The restrictions that the government did impose were poorly enforced. During Eid celebrations in May, 1.5m people intent on going home for the holiday flouted a travel ban—an example of “herd stupidity”, as Dr Pandu puts it.
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