November 11, 2022
JAKARTA – As COVID-19 cases increase in the past few weeks, the Health Ministry has recorded a total of 1,373 deaths from Oct. 4 to Nov. 8, with 48 percent of the deaths people who have received no vaccine.
Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin in a statement on Wednesday said that the deaths made up about 5 percent of the total 27,018 patients hospitalized during the period.
Authorities reported 6,601 new COVID-19 infections on Tuesday, the highest daily rise since the previous peak on Aug. 4, when it hit 6,527. A total of 6,186 new cases were reported on Wednesday.
The country has seen cases rise following the detection of the country’s first local transmissions of the new XBB strain of the Omicron variant. The total number of current active cases is 43,797 increasing from 30,080 recorded on Nov. 3.
Budi also reported that of the total number of hospitalized patients in the past month, 10,639 had medium, severe and critical symptoms.
“Of this group, 40 percent have yet to receive any shot. Furthermore, 84 percent of deaths [in patients of this category] have not received booster jabs,” the minister said as quoted by Tempo.
He also reported that since Oct. 29, at least half of the patients having to be treated at intensive-care units were those above 60 years old.
Curb continues
The government will maintain the four-tiered public activity restrictions (PPKM) level amid a new rise in COVID-19 cases and local transmissions of the new XBB strain of the Omicron variant.
“I reiterate that the government will keep using the PPKM level as the basis for activity curbs for residents, which we will keep evaluating as well,” Coordinating Maritime Affairs and Investment Minister Luhut Pandjaitan said on his Instagram post on Friday.
The minister, who oversees the government’s pandemic responses in Java and Bali, said that during the PPKM evaluation meeting earlier on Friday, he urged caution and reevaluation as the past week had seen the rise of new daily cases that passed the 5,000 mark.
Luhut said that currently Java and Bali are witnessing rising new confirmed cases daily and a significant rise of deaths in Central Java and Yogyakarta.
The minister also said that according to past data and the trajectory of COVID-19 cases, any new variants of the virus would reach their peak in the next one to two months.
He added that the new XBB strain was expected to reach its peak wave lower than during the Omicron variant wave earlier this year.
The first confirmed case caused by the XBB subvariant detected on Oct. 22 was a 29-year-old woman who lives in Surabaya, East Java, who had traveled to Lombok, West Nusa Tenggara.
XBB is said to be the most antibody-evasive subvariant to date, although there is no evidence that it can cause more severe illness in people who have immunity from a previous infection or vaccine.
Some scientists believe XBB is more contagious than BA.5, another Omicron subvariant that triggered a wave of infections in Indonesia in July and August. (dre)