The death toll from the coronavirus outbreak in Indonesia neared 1,000 as more cases were confirmed across the archipelago, with President Joko Widodo expressing disappointment over the slow progress in ramping up testing to detect the disease.
Eighteen people succumbed to the virus in the past 24 hours, taking the total to 991, Achmad Yurianto, a spokesman for the government task force on COVID-19, said in a televised briefing on Monday. The total number of positive cases rose by 233 to 14,265, he said.
With the pandemic showing no signs of slowing, Jokowi, as Widodo is known, called for scaling up the nation’s diagnostic capacity, saying the daily testing of 4,000 to 5,000 specimens was "far below our target.” A lack of trained manpower and stretched medical infrastructure system have limited the country of 270 million people to test only about 116,000 suspects, missing a target to ramp up testing to 10,000 a day.