Coronavirus: Indonesia poll to go ahead despite outbreak fears

Indonesia will push ahead with local elections despite a task force warning of hundreds of ‘COVID-19 transmission risk areas’.

People live in a partitioned shelter in Deyangan village in Magelang, Central Java, Indonesia. Picture: Getty Images

Indonesia will push ahead with local elections across 270 regions early next month, despite a task force warning of hundreds of “COVID-19 transmission risk areas”.

More than 100 million people are eligible to vote for nine governors, 37 mayors and 224 regents on December 9, amid fears the polls could become a super-spreader in a country that has struggled to stem the infection spread.

COVID-19 task force head Doni Monardo told a parliamentary commission there were 17 towns with a high risk of disease transmission and 215 towns at medium risk.

The government is determined to hold elections — despite infections reaching a record daily high of more than 5400 this month — after postponing them in September because of the pandemic.

But public health experts are concerned about fresh waves of infection clusters emerging, pointing to hundreds of new cases across the country already linked to campaigning.

Authorities have assured the public the elections will be run along COVID-safe lines, and some local election commissions say they will have separate polling booths for suspected COVID patients.

That is little comfort to epidemiologists such as University of Indonesia’s Tri Yunis Miko Wahyono who told The Weekend Australian there was a high possibility of an asymptomatic patient using a regular booth. “I’m concerned that these elections could give rise to several super-spreader events,” Dr Wahyono said.

Indonesia’s official national caseload is at 483,518, with 15,600 fatalities, but health experts say the country’s low testing rates mean the real figure is likely much higher.

President Joko Widodo has insisted the elections must go ahead “to protect the constitutional rights of the people to vote”. His son Gibran Rakabuming and son-in-law Bobby Nasution are running for mayor in their hometowns.

In the absence of an effective test and tracing regime, the government has been counting on a vaccine. But hopes of rolling out the first vaccinations before the end of the year were stymied this week by the head of the country’s food and drug monitoring agency who told a parliamentary commission there was still insufficient data to support emergency use authorisation for the Chinese-developed CoronaVac next month.