TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin on Monday announced that the two latest COVID-19 Omicron subvariants, BA.4 and BA.5, have been detected in Indonesia. He predicted that a heightened number of cases will come in the next following weeks after this discovery. However, he asserted that the new variants are less lethal compared to the initial variants that have spread locally.

“The mortality rate is 1/10 compared to the deaths caused by the Delta and the Omicron variants. Even though the new subvariants sparked an increase in cases across a number of countries, its peak and hospitalization, and deaths, are far lower than the earliest iteration of Omicron,” said the minister at the Merdeka Palace in Central Jakarta on June 13.

He said there are currently eight cases of these new COVID-19 variants with three of them being imported cases. The infected patient is a Brazilian national who arrived in Indonesia to attend the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction in Bali.

While the other five cases of the Omicron subvariants are local transmission with 4 cases detected in Jakarta and one case in Bali.

"So indeed this local transmission has occurred in Jakarta. Our observations show that an increase in confirmed cases has indeed occurred in Jakarta as well as in West Java, Banten, and also in Bali," the Health Minister explained.

Meanwhile, Coordinator Minister of Economics Airlangga Hartarto claims the infection rate in Indonesia is still considerably lower than in neighboring countries. Indonesia currently logs 574 daily cases while Australia reportedly logged 16 thousand daily cases, India (8,500 daily cases), Singapore (3,100 daily cases), Thailand (2,400 cases), and Malaysia (1,700 cases).

M JULNIS FIRMANSYAH

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