Indonesia reported 10,185 new confirmed cases yesterday, breaking the 10,000 mark for the third consecutive day, 17 new deaths, and about 68,000 patients under treatment or isolation. Yesterday’s new confirmed cases were still concentrated in Jakarta, reaching 5,268. The number of new confirmed cases in a single day in the past three days has exceeded 5,000.
Health Minister Budi said that when the Delta variant ravaged Indonesia last year, there was a record of nearly 57,000 new diagnoses in a single day in July. According to the experience of other countries, the number of infections caused by the Omicron variant is 3 to 6 times that of the peak period of the Delta variant, and the epidemic in Indonesia will heat up again.
The Danish study pointed out that the subvariant BA.2 of the highly infectious variant of COVID-19 Omicron is even more infectious than the original version.
BA.2 aka ‘Hidden Omicron’, was first spotted earlier this year. BA.2 has now replaced Omicron’s first-generation variant BA.1 as the main virus strain in Denmark.
The Statens Serum Institut (SSI), Denmark’s top infectious disease control agency, issued a statement saying that individuals infected with BA.2 have a 39% chance of infecting another person in their home within a week, compared with only 29% for the first-generation Omicron.
The study, conducted by SSI researchers and Danish tertiary institutions, involved 18,000 people and was conducted between December 20 last year and January 18 this year.
