Jakarta, MINA – Indonesian Minister of Health Budi Gunadi Sadikin chaired the ASEAN Health Ministers’ Special Meeting to discuss developments and efforts to overcome the Covid-19 pandemic.
Ministers of Health from various ASEAN countries joined the virtual meeting including Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Thailand.
“ASEAN member countries that are experiencing a spike in cases are strengthening their efforts in handling the pandemic through increasing testing, tracing and treatment capacity, as well as vaccination,” Budi said in a statement on Saturday.
Minister of Health Budi said that ASEAN currently has five countries with a high spike in cases due to virus mutations.
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Meanwhile, the remaining five countries are known to have succeeded in controlling the rate of transmission of Covid-19 and maintaining the trend of cases with a relatively low number.
In this meeting, the ASEAN Health Ministers also agreed on one thing that vaccination is one of the important efforts to end the Covid-19 pandemic.
With this, ASEAN is committed to encouraging multilateral schemes to ensure the availability of vaccines in all countries equally and fairly.
This is so that the vaccination process can be accelerated and reach the target in a short time.
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During this meeting, the ASEAN Portal on Public Health Emergencies was also launched as a form of utilizing digital technology in ASEAN.
The portal makes it easy for users to access data on public health emergencies in ASEAN as well as a forum for expert discussion.
Indonesia has so far been the country most affected by Covid-19 in ASEAN with 3,127,826 and 82,000 deaths.
The Philippines ranks second with 1.5 million cases and 27,000 deaths. (T/RE1)
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