Wednesday, September 16, 2020

Jakarta's Neighbor Finds Covid-19 Cases May Be 50 Times Higher Than the Official Figures

BY :DION BISARA

SEPTEMBER 15, 2020

Jakarta. Tangerang, a city in Banten province with two million inhabitants on the outskirts of Jakarta, has found that the real number of Covid-19 cases among its population might be about 50 times higher than the official figures after completing an epidemiological study last month. 
The study concluded that the novel coronavirus had infected about 2.43 percent of residents in Tangerang. That percentage translates to around 53,100 people, as the city has a population of 2.19 million people, according to the Central Statistics Agency's latest available data. 
"infected about 2.43 percent of residents"

Mayor Arief Wismansyah said in a statement on Monday that the city's health department and the University of Indonesia's school of public health conducted the study on a random sample of 3,000 people. 

The study participants took serology tests that detected particular antibodies in one's blood. The antibodies' presence indicated they might have exposed to the coronavirus sometime in the past.

The study used a two-stage stratified sampling method and reported a 95 percent confidence interval of between 1.9 percent to 3 percent. That means the actual number of people exposed to Covid-19 may lie somewhere between 41,500 to 65,500.

In comparison, Tangerang only confirmed a total of 1,071 cases as of Tuesday, with 57 deaths. Jakarta, Indonesia's current epicenter of the pandemic, reported on Tuesday a total of 56,175 people in the capital had had Covid-19, and 1,450 of them had died.

Arief said the survey result had shown that the majority of the Covid-19 cases in the city have gone undetected with the majority of the infected people who did not show any symptom. Often, asymptomatic family members carried the coronavirus into their home and infected other family members, Arief said.

"That's why we tightened the restriction again so that the number [of new cases] would decline," Arief said in the statement.

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