Epidemiologist Suggests Central Govt Prep PSBB on Java Island

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Epidemiologist from Australia's Griffith University, Dicky Budiman, asked the government to prepare a lockdown or a fully large-scale social restriction (PSBB) on Java Island in a bid to anticipate a spike in COVID-19 cases after Christmas and New Year holidays.

“The government must be ready with a contingency plan. The worst-case scenario option that we will need is the so-called emergency brake, which is PSBB in Java,” Dicky told Tempo on Monday, Dec. 21, 2020.

Dicky predicted that the pandemic will get even worse in January. If the government is not well-prepared, the pandemic handling will be as ineffective as before. The worst-case scenario, he said, needs to be prepared per island.

Moreover, this measure will be related to the vaccination programs. “This will be related [to the vaccination programs]. Because if it is not controlled, vaccination programs will fail,” Dicky argued.

According to him, the current epidemiological modeling showed an increasingly serious situation given that the lowest new daily cases were estimated to reach 20,000 cases, and testing coverage was still very low.

“This means that the snowball effect that is happening since the pandemic started that we cannot handle yet is getting bigger,” Dicky said.

Additionally, there were skyrocketing trends in daily cases, the mortality rate, and the positivity rate, which proved that this pandemic was out of control, Dicky opined. The only way, he added, was that the government must enhance the 3T, viz. testing, tracing, treatment.

Based on data from the COVID-19 Mitigation Task Force on December 20, 2020, Indonesia broke the record of deaths with an additional 221 cases a day. The active cases hit 15.5 percent or 103,239 out of the total of 664,930 confirmed cases. There were also 6,982 new infections and 5,551 recoveries.

Read: Anies Baswedan Extends Transitional PSBB Restriction in Jakarta

FRISKI RIANA