"This monkeypox illness is not too severe. We can stay calm. Even if we compare it with COVID-19, it (monkeypox) is far (less severe)," Syahril said at an online press conference here on Saturday.
Monkeypox has an incubation period of 21–28 days, and usually, patients recover on their own as long as they have no comorbidities or suffer from additional infections, he added.
"If the patient has no comorbidities, no immunocompromised, and no other things that worsen, inshallah (if God wills), this patient can actually recover on his own," he said.
Based on reports of monkeypox cases worldwide, the number of patients who have died is very small, with only about 1 percent or 400 patients dying out of the total 39,700 patients, he noted.
"Thus, it is very small, far compared to COVID, which sometimes reaches 10 percent to 15 percent," he said.
In addition, monkeypox patients treated in hospitals do not require to be kept in negative pressure isolation rooms like COVID-19 patients.
"The isolation rooms are different. Even though they are both isolation rooms, isolation rooms for COVID are negative pressure rooms, while for monkeypox, it does not require negative pressure rooms," he explained.
On Saturday, the Ministry of Health announced that Indonesia’s first monkeypox infection had been confirmed in a 27-year-old man in Jakarta.
According to Syahril, the patient recently traveled abroad and experienced symptoms such as fever and rashes in some parts of his body.
In addition, the patient experienced spleen enlargement, he added.
"However, the condition is good, meaning that he is not severely ill, and he has rashes on his face, on the palms of his hands, feet, and some around the genitals," he said.
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Translator: Anita Permata, Raka Adji
Editor: Rahmad Nasution
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