Nearly 1,300 people at a military academy in Indonesia have tested positive for the coronavirus, an official said, as the country struggles to contain the
epidemic.
The Indonesian Army Officer Candidate School in the country’s most populated province of West Java has been quarantined and 30 people were initially hospitalised with mild symptoms, the army’s chief of staff, General Andika Perkasa, said late
Saturday.
Of the 1,280 confirmed infections, 991 were cadets and the rest were staff and their family members, he said. Most had no symptoms.
Seventeen were still in
hospital on Saturday.
The outbreak was first detected when two cadets went to a medical facility after complaining of fever and back pain.
Both tested positive for Covid-19, sparking mass swab testing at the academy, which has 2,000 staff and cadets.
It is not clear how the cadets were infected, Perkasa said, but some staff live outside the
military complex.
The governor of West Java apologised for the outbreak and urged residents to restrict their movements in and out of the neighbourhood where the academy is located until it is brought under control.
Indonesia is the hardest hit country in South East Asia with more than 74,000 known cases of Covid-19 and over 3,500 deaths.
The real toll is widely believed to be much higher, however, with experts saying limited testing was understating the true scale of the crisis.
The infections have continued to rise in the world’s fourth-most populous nation even after repeated warnings from President Joko Widodo to his officials to take the crisis seriously. On July 9, when the country reported the highest daily number of cases, Jokowi, as the president is popularly known, called the situation a “red signal.”
The pandemic has hit Indonesia harder than the 1997 Asian financial crisis, battering small and big businesses alike, Jokowi said last month.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) recently urged
Indonesia to do more testing.
Health workers conduct a swab test on civilians, some of the 28 living in the compounds of the Indonesian army’s Officer Candidate School in Bandung yesterday, after more than 1,200 military personnel including instructors of the institution were tested positive for Covid-19.
