Ever wonder why, in many parts of Jakarta, the “new normal” feels just like the old normal? A survey of Jakartans’ attitudes towards COVID-19 may provide the answer to that question.
A survey conducted by Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and Lapor COVID-19 (Report COVID-19), a civil society coalition that crowdsources coronavirus information from across the country, found that the majority of Jakartans don’t believe they’re at risk of being infected with the coronavirus.
“They believe that the risk of contracting COVID-19 is very small. On an individual level, 77 percent believe they won’t get COVID-19,” NTU associate professor Sulfikar Amir said yesterday.
The survey also shows that 76 percent of Jakartans believe that they won’t get infected by family and people closest to them, while 70 percent believe that they won’t be infected by their neighbors.
Researchers established a link between Jakartans’ confidence of being safe from the coronavirus with the fact that 94 percent of respondents said that they personally don’t know anyone who has COVID-19.
The survey was carried out from May 29-June 29 involving 154,471 respondents picked with a methodology to proportionately represent Jakarta’s demographic groups.
As of July 5, Jakarta had 12,435 confirmed COVID-19 cases, including 7,663 recoveries and 649 deaths. With undercounting concerns in mind, the official numbers certainly represent a small fraction of Jakarta’s total population of around 9.6 million.
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