JAKARTA (THE STRAITS TIMES/ANN) – Indonesia expects its daily new coronavirus cases to fall below 5,000 in April as two-thirds of its 34 provinces have seen a decline in cases.
“We forecast daily new cases would return to below 5,000 within the next 40 days,” Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin said yesterday.
Charts issued by the Health Ministry on Wednesday showed the Omicron wave peaked at 64,718 daily cases last week, before the count consistently declined. The number of new
Covid-19 cases recorded on March 2, about a week after the peak, was 40,920.
During the peak of the Delta wave in mid-July, 56,757 daily new cases were recorded.
Prior to the Delta wave, Indonesia’s first Covid-19 peak involving the original strain was in late January 2021.
In the latest wave, 15 of Indonesia’s 34 provinces, including Jakarta, Bali, West Java, East Java, South Sumatra, South Sulawesi and South Kalimantan, recorded a drop in daily cases; eight others that have recorded a slope down include Central Java, North Sumatra and Lampung, data released on March 2 by the Health Ministry showed.
“Daily fatality rate nationwide… is still on an uptrend, but extrapolating the pattern of the last Delta wave, (the daily fatality rate) would start declining within the next two to three weeks from now,” Budi said.
