By: Muhammad Yasin)*
Covid-19 cases in Java-Bali are indicated to be starting to decline. This condition shows that the policy for the Implementation of Restrictions on Community Activities (PPKM) is starting to show a positive trend.
President of the Republic of Indonesia Ir. Joko Widodo claimed that there was a decline in COVID-19 cases in Java and Bali, starting to show a decline after experiencing a spike in the past month. In fact, the National Capital, which initially recorded a large number of corona virus cases, has now started to sag. President Jokowi also said that we should be grateful because the figures show that the pandemic in Java and Bali is starting to decline slightly and especially in Jakarta.
The escalation of the pandemic, said Jokowi, was marked by a decrease in the bed occupancy rate (BOR) at various Covid-19 referral hospitals. At the Wisma Atlet Jakarta Emergency Covid-19 Hospital, for example, on August 6, 2021 morning, the number of cases was 25%. Whereas at 6-8 weeks the figure reaches 90%.
Jokowi admitted that he always monitors hospital BOR figures every night. However, Jokowi reminded all parties to remain careful and vigilant. By being disciplined towards health protocols (prokes) starting from wearing masks, washing hands to maintaining distance, must continue to be applied.
As is known, the situation of the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia is still deteriorating since mid-June 2021. Every day the corona virus cases increase past 2,000 cases. Based on data compiled by the government on August 5, 2021 at 12.00 WIB, there were 35,764 new cases of Covid-19 in a day.
This addition causes the total number of Covid-19 cases in Indonesia to currently reach 3,568,331 people, as of the first case announced by President Joko Widodo on March 2, 2020.
The number of patients who died after being exposed to Covid-19 also continued to grow. In the period 4-5 August 2021, there were 1,739 Covid-19 patients who died. Thus, the death toll from Covid-19 has reached 102,375 people, as of the beginning of the pandemic.
Meanwhile, DKI Jakarta Province noted that the decline was for positive cases. Currently, new daily cases are in the range of 2 thousand per day. This figure is of course far from before. Where the cases even reach tens of thousands per day.
Based on data from the Indonesian Ministry of Health, there were an additional 2,185 positive cases. So that in total, positive cases in DKI Jakarta currently reach 827,842 positive cases. With this data, the active cases of Covid-19 in DKI fell again and there were 12,798 remaining. DKI Jakarta has finally become the province in Java-Bali with the lowest active Covid-19 cases.
This figure is the lowest when compared to West Java which has 107,907 active cases. While Central Java 45,972 cases and East Java 46,978 cases. If seen since the beginning of the week, yesterday’s cases were lower than Thursday’s 2,311 cases and Wednesday’s 2,981 cases. However, when compared to Tuesday and Monday, the cases tended to rise where at that time the cases were recorded at 1,601 and 1,401.
Previously, in the last upload on his Instagram account @aniesbaswedan, Anies Baswedan wrote, since we all have reduced mobility, the pandemic situation in Jakarta continues to decline and God willing, we can get out of this critical period, as can be seen from the occupied IGDs of various hospitals in Jakarta.
He added that in the last few weeks he had continued to monitor several regional public hospitals in Jakarta. As cases increase, conditions in hospitals are now more controlled because the capacity of isolation beds from the ER to the ICU is available.
Epidemiologist from the Faculty of Public Health, University of Indonesia (FKM UI) Iwan Ariawan also predicts that daily cases of Covid-19 will decrease with the extension of the PPKM. Iwan said, from the results of his team’s monitoring, the daily cases of COVID-19 in most of Java-Bali have decreased, but one must be careful outside Java-Bali, which is starting to increase.
According to Iwan, the requirement for Covid-19 cases to continue to decline is to return to the Covid-19 outbreak control strategy, namely 5M (washing hands, wearing masks, maintaining distance, avoiding crowds and limiting mobility). According to him, PPKM is going up and down according to the indicators. The PPKM level is only lowered if the conditions for the reduction according to the indicators have been met.
This decreasing number of cases is of course good news to be grateful for because a decrease in the number of cases is the same as bringing us closer to herd immunity, however, we must remain vigilant and disciplined in implementing health protocols.
)* The author is a contributor to the Press Circle and Cikini Students
