The policy is parallel with the attempts to fix the national recording and reporting system
Jakarta (ANTARA) - Head of the expert team of the COVID-19 Task Force Prof. Wiku Adisasmito has said that the exclusion of the death toll from the group of indicators used in COVID-19 handling is just temporary.

"The policy is parallel with the attempts to fix the national recording and reporting system," he said in a short message received in Jakarta on Thursday.

Rectification of the regional death count system has been undertaken to establish right decision-making through collection of valid data, he added.

Separately, Yemiko Heppy from the COVID-19 Public Report Team has said that there have been complaints from the public -- gathered from social media -- about the accuracy of COVID-19 reports received from the central government.

"We have got several reports about COVID-19 data accuracy, though it is not so many," he added.

According to the COVID-19 Report Team, a difference has been detected in the death count reported on the provincial governments' website and the Health Ministry's site.

"In July alone, there were 19 thousand deaths reported by regional governments which were not reported by the central government. Where did the data go?" he asked.

Several regions with a large death count difference were also identified on Saturday (August 7). Those regions were Central Java, with a difference of 9,662, and West Java, with a difference of 6,215, he said.

"The difference (in data) also happened in Yogyakarta, Papua, West Kalimantan, North Sumatra, and Central Kalimantan," he revealed.

He urged the government to not brush off the death count as an indicator for community activity restriction evaluation. "Death count data is an indicator of effect and scale of pandemic that needs to be known by the public so that (they are) not ignorant of the risks," Heppy stressed.

He deemed the exclusion of death count data "wrongful", arguing the data served as an indicator to gauge the terrible effects of the pandemic.

"The government must fix the technicality of data recording and input probable death count data, not erase it (instead)," he suggested.

Furthermore, he pointed out that the death count data from the government does not sufficiently illustrate the effect of pandemic. "Facts on the field are way more terrifying than the data reported," Heppy remarked.

The effort to fix data by excluding accumulated death reports of one week, even prior months, might compromise with the principle of transparency, he added.

"Deleting death count (data) is not a responsible act over what has happened all along. What (we) need is for the government to provide a regulation system where the (death count recording) system has no scope for data deviation," Heppy said.

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Translator: Andi Firdaus, Mecca Yumna
Editor: Sri Haryati
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