Indonesian Virus Cases Top Singapore as Pandemic Spreads

(Bloomberg) -- Indonesia surpassed Singapore as the country with the most number of coronavirus infections in Southeast Asia as the world’s fourth-most populous nation ramped up testing across the archipelago to contain the pandemic.

Confirmed new cases jumped 1,031 in the past 24 hours, taking Indonesia’s total to 41,431, Achmad Yurianto, a health ministry official, said at a briefing in Jakarta. That exceeded Singapore’s tally of 41,216, official data showed. The nation’s death toll stood at 2,276, also the highest in Southeast Asia.

Indonesia has seen a surge in infections in recent weeks with the ramping up of virus testing as authorities began easing social distancing rules in capital Jakarta and other cities to revive an economy brought to a halt by the pandemic. President Joko Widodo and other officials have called for steps to prevent a second wave of infections and threatened to reimpose social distancing rules to contain the virus.

While majority of the infections in Singapore is from the migrant worker clusters, Indonesia has reported cases from all its 34 provinces spread across a chain of islands. The virus deaths in the country of almost 270 million people may be more than three times the official tally, according to LaporCovid-19 and KawalCOVID19, two open-source data platforms.

“The current trend in daily cases appears to be reflecting the reality on the ground,” Ngurah Mahardika, a virologist at Udayana University in Bali, said by phone. “I’m expecting the current wave to peak around June 21 and we should see the daily cases falling from then, but my model suggest that a second peak may come at around Dec. 21.”

A second wave of infections can be prevented if the authorities maintained strict social distancing measures to mitigate the spread of the disease, Mahardika said.

Indonesia has scaled up average daily testing to almost 20,000 as targeted by Widodo, who says the disease will linger until a vaccine become available to everyone. The country has conducted polymerase chain reaction tests on 348,278 people, official data show, and there are more than 13,279 suspected patients still waiting to be diagnosed.

East Java, home to country’s second-largest city Surabaya, and South Sulawesi have emerged as the nation’s new hot spots for the virus. East Java, with an estimated population of 40 million, saw infections surge by 225 to 8,533. The death toll in the province reached 651.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.