Dicky Budiman, an Indonesian epidemiologist at Griffith University in Australia, said: “Indonesia may become the center of the pandemic, but it is already the center of Asia.”
“If you look at the demographic differences between India and Indonesia… then this epidemic is much worse than India.”
Budiman warned that the actual daily number of cases in Indonesia may exceed 100,000 per day, and may double by the end of this month, with as many as 2,000 virus deaths per day.
India was hit by the dazzling wave of the new crown virus earlier this year and now reports an average of about 44,000 cases and 1,028 deaths per day.
But according to data from the website ourworldindata.org, its population is almost five times that of Indonesia’s nearly 270 million people. Indonesia has about 141 cases per million people, and India has about 29 cases per million people.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the cumulative number of infections in India has exceeded 30 million and the death toll has exceeded 400,000, far exceeding the official Indonesian 2.6 million cases and 69210 deaths.
