TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Governor Anies Baswedan on Wednesday announced that the capital city could not be considered safe from the COVID-19 as he revealed the effective reproduction number or 'Rt' is still within 1.

This comes after the Governor announced that the number had slightly dropped from 0.99 to 0.98.

“Our reproduction rate is still at 1, which is not safe yet. This remains to be the same as last month,” said Anies Baswedan yesterday.

This reason alone was also what drove the Jakarta administration to eventually extend the transitional PSBB (large-scale social restriction) to another 14-days which maintains to relax only 50 percent of COVID-19 social restrictions.

“We do not want to relax it from 50 to 100 percent only to risk seeing a surge in cases. We will maintain it at 50 percent [restriction] and hopefully, we can contain it,” said Anies Baswedan.

He further elaborates that the surge in COVID-19 cases during the transitional PSBB is due to the government’s endless attempts to launch active case findings to community healthcare units (Puskesmas) and visiting people with high probability.

Anies Baswedan made it clear that he will not reduce the number of testing just to present the public with a seemingly smaller number of cases and asserts that the Jakarta administration, along with the central government, is committed to definitively controlling the pandemic.

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IMAM HAMDI