Jakarta Deputy Gov Denies Drop in COVID-19 Cases due to Less Tests

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Jakarta Deputy Governor Ahmad Riza Patria rebuffed allegations that the drop in daily COVID-19 cases in the capital was due to less testing. He said the testing number during the past week remained high.

“[We carried out] 207,339 tests last week. This means it was 20-folds of the WHO standards,” said Riza at the City Hall on Friday, July 23.

The city’s COVID-19 daily trend in the last few days has indeed decreased, yet still tended to fluctuate.

After previously recording tens of thousands of new cases per day, Jakarta logged 9,128 new infections that were obtained from 33,772 tests on Sunday, July 18. The day after, the daily trend dropped to around 5,000 new cases with 18,624 tests.

The figure rose to 6,123 cases from 27,199 PCR tests on July 20 and to 5,904 cases from 23,494 tests on July 21.

On Thursday, July 22, the city’s daily cases increased to 7,058 cases, which were extracted from 28,512 PCR tests. From the figures, it was proven that the drop in new daily cases occurred when the number of tests decreased.

However, Riza said the decline in daily COVID-19 cases was attributable to the successful enforcement of the emergency public activity restrictions or Emergency PPKM. “On that basis, we ask the public to keep maintaining and complying with the health protocols,” said Riza.

Read: Emergency PPKM Reduces Jakarta People Mobility by 50 Percent

ADAM PRIREZA