Ivany Atina Arbi, Jakarta – Indonesia registered a record high of 4,168 new COVID-19 cases on Saturday, bringing the country's total to 240,687 cases with 9,448 fatalities.
A number of provinces in Java, particularly Jakarta and East Java, have become the nation's hotbeds of contagion.
Jakarta added 988 confirmed cases on Saturday, bringing the city's total to 60,828 cases, a quarter of the country's cases, with 1,527 fatalities. East Java has reported a total of 40,372 cases and 2,942 deaths. Central Java and West Java have seen nearly 20,000 COVID-19 cases each.
Indonesia now has the second-highest number of recorded COVID-19 cases in Southeast Asia. The Philippines has the highest, with 283,460 cases as of Saturday, according to worldometers.info. Indonesia currently has the 23rd-highest number of cases of any country in the world.
The government recently decided to implement stricter health protocols in an attempt to curb the transmission of the virus and has assigned the military and the police to enforce the protocols.
Coordinating Maritime Affairs and Investment Minister Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan said on Friday that such measures would be in place for the coming months until the country was able to vaccinate residents en masse, which he expected to happen in December.
There is no proven vaccine for COVID-19.
The minister said he was confident that the country would be able to control the health crisis from December onward as he claimed it would start to vaccinate tens of millions of citizens at that time.
Indonesia has reportedly secured 300 million doses of COVID-19 candidate vaccines from foreign pharmaceutical companies, including China's Sinovac Biotech.