Indonesia seems to be in the midst of a disconnect between the central and regional governments in terms of communicating developments regarding the COVID-19 outbreak in the country, with recent contradictory claims between the governor of the province of Banten and the Health Ministry hardly providing any reassurance to the public.
Yesterday, Banten Governor Wahidin Halim posted a video on his official Instagram account, announcing to the citizens of the westernmost province on Java that two people have tested positive for the coronavirus.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B9oXTvtlq2K/
“I am announcing that, based on reports by Banten’s Health Agency, two Banten citizens have tested positive for the coronavirus,” Wahidin said, adding that they both had recently traveled to Malaysia.
Wahidin did not say if the two patients are part of the 34 cases previously confirmed by the central government or if they were new cases.
In response to Wahidin’s message, the central government said there was no way that a governor would be privy to such information.
“I have not heard [about the two patients in Banten], where the governor of Banten got that information should be looked into. We do not share [COVID-19] data with governors. The data is shared with [regional] health agencies so they can trace [infection clusters],” Achmad Yurianto, Indonesia’s spokesperson for COVID-19-related matters, told reporters yesterday, as quoted by Kompas.
“It could be that the patients are being treated in Jakarta but they are residents of Tangerang (Banten’s capital city). They could be going back and forth between Jakarta and their family [in Tangerang].
“But [the central government] has never given governance authority [to regional governments]. I don’t know, if [Wahidin] got his own data then he can do what he wants.”
Previously, Achmad also stated that the central government has no obligation to inform regional governments about COVID-19 cases after Bali officials went against the central government’s hush policy by revealing that the first fatality of the illness in Indonesia, a 53-year-old British woman, died on the island. The disconnect between the two implies a clear lack of an established communications protocol regarding COVID-19 in Indonesia.
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