After denial, Indonesia sees mounting coronavirus deaths

While Indonesia's neighbors scrambled early this year to try to contain the spread of the coronavirus, the government of the world's fourth most populous nation insisted that everything was fine.

In speeches, Indonesia's health minister, Terawan Agus Putranto, told his country's people that they shouldn't fear the virus, even as tens of thousands around the world were being infected.

Rather than focus on creating social distancing guidelines or ramping up testing, Putranto credited Indonesian immunity and the strength of prayer for the country's lack of any infections. He dismissed as insulting" a report by Harvard University researchers that said Indonesia must have elected not to report its cases.

Meanwhile, Indonesia's southern neighbor Australia and some fellow Southeast Asian countries such as Singapore were quick out of the gate to address the crisis, taking actions as early as the end of January that included containment and tracing measures.

Indonesia, on the other hand, did not even confirm its first case of the virus until early March. As of Monday, the nation had reported at least 6,760 infections including 590 deaths from COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, more fatalities than any Asian country other than China.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo acknowledged last month that the government had chosen to keep the public misinformed about the state of the coronavirus in the country.

Indeed, we did not deliver certain information to the public because we did not want to stir panic, he said.

Suspicion over the lack of cases in Indonesia began to grow when a Chinese tourist who had traveled from Wuhan the central Chinese city where the pandemic started late last year to the Indonesian resort island of Bali tested positive for the coronavirus when he returned to China in early February.

Indonesian authorities, however, immediately played down the incident, with Defense Minister Muhammad Mahfud declaring, The coronavirus does not exist in Indonesia. Widodo, perhaps spurred by a desire for economic growth, promoted Putranto's theories, ignoring the likelihood that the vast archipelago nation had virus cases.