The surge in positive cases of COVID-19 occurred today, Thursday (3 February), which shows that Indonesia is climbing the ladder of the third wave of Covid-19.

Today the daily positive case of COVID-19 is at 27,197. A drastic increase from 17,895 cases on Wednesday (2/2/2022) or an increase of 10,000 new daily cases.

Cases of patients died increased by 38 cases today, and cases recovered increased by 5,994. From this addition, DKI Jakarta contributed the highest addition of 10,117 cases.

Epidemiologist at Griffith University Austria, Dicky Budiman, said that Indonesia is currently treading the third wave of stairs. In fact, according to Dicky, the dominant variant at the moment is Omicron, which is a variant of concern (VOC).

It is known that VOCs are a variant of concern because they have a fairly high transmission rate, high virulence, and reduce the effectiveness of diagnostics and vaccines.

"This Omicron was only used as a VOC about 10 weeks ago, but the impact is extraordinary, more than 140 countries have caused waves in many countries and even caused many record-breaking cases of infection in the majority of countries," said Dicky.

Dicky emphasized that the important message when the cases were over 20 thousand is to continue to strengthen testing, tracing and treatment or 3T. Because the addition of cases with a very high spike also shows the tip of the iceberg phenomenon.

Dicky said that with the increase in daily cases, the government had to anticipate that health services and facilities would not be overwhelmed by the handling of patients.