TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin in an exclusive interview with Tempo Magazine admitted the government was faced by a plethora of problems in the field related to COVID-19 mitigation.

One of which, he said, was the problem of coordination between the central government and the regional administrations. He acknowledged the existence of many regional governments not being transparent about their tracking of COVID-19 cases to avoid being categorized as coronavirus red zones.

He believed this was one of the causes behind the unsynchronized data in the field and official records, which was why he often had to pay field visits to these regions.

“Let’s take the example of 13,000 positive cases, but the number of bed occupancies exceeds 13,000,” said the Health Minister in the interview published in Tempo Magazine, July 10 edition.

The Indonesian government is currently determining a region’s COVID-19 handling based on assessment scores. An area classified as level four are regions recording more than 30 COVID-19 hospitalizations for every 100 thousand population in the past week.

Read more about this exclusive interview with Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin and the government’s general handling of the pandemic in Tempo Magazine, July 10 edition.

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DEWI NURITA