The World Health Organization (WHO) has classified Indonesia as a country with a low COVID-19 transmission rate, but citizens should remain cautious because the pandemic is not yet over, a Health Ministry official has said.

“At the national level, we are now at Level 2. While several indicators show that we are at Level 1, there are components within response capacity that we still deem are at medium level,” the ministry’s COVID-19 Vaccination spokesperson, Siti Nadia Tarmizi, noted.

Indonesia is currently using the WHO indicators to evaluate the response situation and capacity at the national and regional level described within the Health Minister’s Decision No. 4805 of 2021, she told ANTARA here on Thursday.

This analysis can directly be observed by visiting the Health Ministry’s website https://vaksin.kemkes.go.id, she said.

“It should be noted that the level, from one to four, is still within the context or scenario of highest transmission, namely community transmission,” she explained.

“This means there are still several classifications such as case clusterization, case importations, and unreported cases,” she elaborated.

The WHO, through the COVID-19 situation development in Indonesia report that was issued on Wednesday, announced that infections in all provinces have indicated a downward trend since August 2021.

The WHO advised regional governments to continue to strictly monitor each infection cluster to ensure a fast response to manage the risk of a follow-up plague, Tarmizi said.

Close contact tracing for every case is important to prevent the spread of infection, WHO wrote on its report, accessed on Thursday.

It also declared that Indonesia has improved its COVID-19 testing standard from one per thousand citizens per week in the middle of May 2021 to 4 per thousand citizens in the last seven weeks.

On a national level, the positivity rate has been consistently under 2 percent in the last week, which is in accordance with WHO’s standards.

Source: Antara News