Indonesia hits record 47,000 cases in a day

Indonesia has surpassed India and Brazil for new coronavirus ­infections after adding a record 47,899 cases in a single day.

Public safety officers seal the casket of a man suspected to have died of Covid-19 in Jakarta on Tuesday. Picture: Getty Images

Indonesia has surpassed India and Brazil for new coronavirus ­infections after adding a record 47,899 cases in a single day, with officials appealing to the public to stay home to slow down the surge dominated by the Delta strain.

The number of Covid-19 cases in India meanwhile has tapered off after a second wave of the pandemic in May. The country registered 37,152 new cases on Monday.

Experts suggest Indonesia has not seen the peak of the surge and could see “up to 100,000 new cases daily” as the government pledges to increase testing and tracing.

“There is no need to be surprised if we see 100,000 or more cases daily, because there’s ­already massive transmission in the community … now it’s just the matter of quickly discovering and isolating them,” said public health expert Hermawan Saputra.

“The quicker we detect these cases, the more lives we can save.”

A partial lockdown, including a ban on restaurant dining, tighter travel checks and closure of non-essential offices, in areas with uncontrolled Covid-19 transmission will run until July 20.

But with no end in sight, critics have urged the government to ­extend it or “risk more victims and overburdening the health system”.

“The government would have to be very cruel and uncaring if they loosened the restrictions, we have already lost too many lives in this second wave – doctors, nurses, children losing their parents,” University of Indonesia epidemiologist Tri Yunis Miko Wahyono told The Australian.

In a statement earlier this week, the National Covid-19 Task Force said extending the lockdown “was not impossible” and a senior official on Wednesday urged workers to take extra ­precautions.

“I recommend industrial ­labourers to reduce their work hours ... and avoid gathering for lunch and crowding,” said Co-ordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs and Investment Luhut Pandjaitan, who was appointed to oversee Indonesia’s Covid-19 ­response.

“I hope in the next few days we can see more areas with mobility reduced by 20 or 30 per cent,” he said.

The Indonesian government hopes to reduce the daily rate of new cases to below 10,000 by ­August, but a spokesman from the task force said activity on the streets must fall by 50 per cent if there was to be a “concrete drop in the numbers”.

Budi Gunadi Sadikin, Indonesia’s Health Minister, told a parliamentary hearing that the Delta variant had now “spread outside of Java island”, raising fears that new outbreaks could devastate weaker health systems in Lampung, Riau Islands, and West Papua.

The strain, first detected in India, is thought to have caused the alarming climb of new infections in Indonesia over the past month, leading to an overwhelmed hospital system.

Officials are racing to protect the public, with a nationwide vaccination program that aims to ­inoculate one million people per day this month.