Indonesia to limit people's mobility as study warns of surge in coronavirus deaths

Indonesian President Joko Widodo said on Monday he planned stricter rules on mobility and social distancing as a study presented to the government warned of a risk of more than 140,000 coronavirus deaths by May without tougher action. Medical experts have said the world's fourth most populous country must impose tighter movement restrictions as known cases of the highly infectious respiratory illness have gone from zero in early March to 1,414, with 122 deaths.

Indonesia accounts for nearly half of the 250 deaths reported from across Southeast Asia, but fewer than a fifth of some 8,400 cases have been confirmed in the region. Nearly one-third of those cases are in Malaysia. Most infections in Indonesia have been concentrated in and around the capital Jakarta. The city of 10 million people has declared a state of emergency that shut down schools and public entertainment, but so far there has been no full public lockdown which the president has been reluctant to impose.

"I'm (now) ordering large-scale social limits, physical distancing needs to be done more sternly, more disciplined, and effectively," Widodo told a cabinet meeting, stressing that only the central government could decide on regional quarantines. President Joko Widodo has encouraged social distancing but questioned whether Indonesians have the discipline for full lockdowns, in contrast with Southeast Asian nations such as the Philippines, Malaysia, and Thailand.

But he appears to have reconsidered this approach after public health experts presented a prediction model to Indonesia's planning agency Bappenas on Friday underlining a need for stronger intervention to prevent a rapid rise in cases and deaths. The model, a copy of which was reviewed by Reuters, said Indonesia could instigate three stages of intervention: mild, moderate, and high. The latter would include very significant levels of testing and making physical distancing mandatory.

With mild intervention, which includes optional physical distancing and limiting public crowds, the researchers from the University of Indonesia said the virus death toll could soar to over 140,000 among over 1.5 million cases by May. "These are just conservative estimates," Pandu Riono, one of the researchers, told Reuters. "But we have to be ready even in these circumstances."

Riono characterized measures currently taken by Indonesia, from rapid testing and deploying regional labs to test samples, as only approaching mild intervention. Health experts have said Indonesia faces a surge in coronavirus cases after a slow government response believed to have masked the scale of the outbreak in a country with still very low levels of testing and with a significant deficit in hospital beds, medical staff and intensive-care facilities.

Bappenas officials said the model served as input for the government and to help them allocate budgets. Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said last week that 62.3 trillion rupiahs ($3.82 billion) of spending in the 2020 budget could be redirected to tackling the coronavirus.

Riono said that the priority now must be to suppress the number of coronavirus cases. "The message (in our model) is that we don't want people dying, we don't want our siblings dying, our friends dying." ($1 = 16,325.0000 rupiah)

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)