WHO urges Indonesia to test more Covid-19 suspected patients amid high death rate

Health workers conduct a swab test on civilians, some of 28 living in the compounds of the Indonesian army's Officer Candidate School in Bandung, on July 11, 2020. - AFP

JAKARTA (The Jakarta Post/ANN): The World Health Organization has urged Indonesia to perform more Covid-19 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests on people suspected to have the illness because it has noted a "substantially high" number of deaths among patients under surveillance (PDP) and people under observation (ODP).

The WHO acknowledged that Indonesia had improved its testing capacity significantly but said many of the PCR tests had been used on people already known to have Covid-19 - as the old WHO guidelines required.