in Indonesia, 1,700 deaths per day and a stammering vaccination campaign

Signals have been red for weeks in Indonesia and mortality figures from Covid-19 have just reached new heights: the death toll was, on average, 1,700 each day in the last week of July, against about a thousand in mid-July. This figure is probably underestimated, consider the majority of experts, because a large number of people die at home.

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Since the start of the epidemic in the Southeast Asian archipelago, 3 million people have been infected with Covid-19 and 98,000 have died from it, according to official figures, for a population of 270 million ‘inhabitants. While the number of daily infections has slowed noticeably – around 40,000 on average every day in the last week of July, down from around 50,000 two weeks earlier – travel restrictions continue to apply in major cities and towns. the agglomerations of the most affected islands, the authorities have just announced.

“Long remained in denial”

The slight decrease in contamination not yet translating into mortality, the gravity of the situation makes many panic, even if life sometimes seems to go on as if nothing had happened. “I escaped the Covid, but around me, in my family and my circle of friends, people keep getting infected”, confides by phone Dewi, 41, resident of a suburb of the capital, Jakarta, and employee in an international organization. “I am afraid, I no longer go out and, when I go out, if I go to the market, I see people who are often carefree, some without a mask”, deplores the young woman who scolds the management of a government “Long remained in denial”.

In the spring of 2020, when Indonesia seemed to have been relatively spared from the virus, former health minister Terawan Agus Putranto, himself a military doctor and radiologist, had been reckless to say the least in his judgments: if the cases of Covid-19 were then not so numerous in the archipelago, “It’s because our prayers have been heard He had advanced. But since the summer of 2021, God no longer seems to be listening. Even in the largest Muslim country in the world, willingly conservative and where piety is respected, the message has been received differently, especially among secular elites. The minister was replaced at the end of 2020.

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