“From the result of the serosurvey, as of January 2023, we see that the proportion of people with immunity against the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is still high, namely 99 percent of the population,” head of the ministry’s Health Development Policy Agency Syarifah Liza Munira said at a press conference on the 2023 serosurvey here on Friday.
According to her, the serosurvey, which involved epidemiologists from the Public Health Faculty of the University of Indonesia, was the third serosurvey carried out by the government since December 2021.
“There is an increase in the antibody of Indonesian people from 98.5 percent to 99 percent of the population,” she highlighted.
She further said that the nationwide serosurvey was carried out in 99 districts and cities in 34 provinces and involved blood sample testing and interviews of 16,286 (94 percent) respondents, who also participated in the two previous serosurveys.
People who had the highest level of antibodies were those who had received the booster vaccine dose, Munira pointed out.
Meanwhile, an epidemiologist from the University of Indonesia Iwan Ariawan said that the serosurvey was the government’s effort to find out the level of protection provided by antibodies formed naturally through infection or through vaccination.
The first serosurvey in December 2021 had shown that 88 percent of the population had developed antibodies against COVID-19, and in the second serosurvey in July 2022, the proportion of the population with antibodies was found to have increased to 98 percent, he noted.
The first case of COVID-19 in Indonesia was confirmed in March 2020. According to data from the COVID-19 Handling Task Force, as of February 2, 2023, the nation has recorded 6,730,537 COVID-19 cases, 6,565,411 recoveries, and 160,822 deaths.
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Translator: Andi Firdaus, Raka Adji
Editor: Azis Kurmala
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