Jakarta, Indonesia – The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has improved Indonesia’s genome sequencing capability and made government monitoring of the pandemic easier, according to Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin on Thursday.
“One of the significant ones is the leap in science and technology in the process of identifying the type or variant of the virus,” he said on the same day during a press conference on the ministry’s performance in 2022 and work programs in 2023.
Previously, the world blamed the increase in COVID-19 cases on high public mobility, according to him. However, it was recently discovered that the main cause was the emergence of new, more dangerous variants.
The introduction of new variants has compelled countries, including Indonesia, to routinely identify their characteristics, differences from previous variants, and transmission patterns.
Sadikin noted that at the start of the pandemic, Indonesia’s capacity to test new variants was still limited, with laboratories that were poorly run.
According to the ministry’s data, there were only 16 genome sequencing laboratories in Indonesia as of December 2020. However, as of December 2022, their number had increased to 41.
“We were able to significantly increase our sequencing capacity from 140 in 9 months to over 5000 in a month. This is extremely beneficial to Indonesia’s pandemic response strategy because we now know who our adversary is and how it spreads “He elaborated.
The minister stated that improving genome sequencing is one way for Indonesia to better deal with the pandemic.
In March 2020, the first case of COVID-19 in Indonesia was confirmed. According to data from the COVID-19 Handling Task Force, the country had 6,722,227 COVID-19 cases, 6,552,823 recoveries, and 160,665 deaths as of January 5, 2023.
Source: Antara