October 4, 2022
JAKARTA – President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo said in a speech delivered on Monday that he was likely to declare the COVID-19 pandemic over very soon.
“The pandemic is beginning to ease off. Perhaps very soon we will have to declare it over,” Jokowi said in a speech delivered during an event for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises.
The President however warned that the improvement in the COVID-19 situation would not automatically translate into better economic conditions.
Jokowi said that the war currently underway in Ukraine would make it difficult to achieve a quick global recovery.
“The world’s economy is not in a good shape. There’s a high degree of uncertainty. Most countries in the world are struggling economically including some the developed nations,” he said in the speech, which was uploaded on the streaming service YouTube on Monday.
In early September, the World Health Organization said that the world had never been in a better position to end the COVID-19 pandemic, the most optimistic outlook yet on the years-long health crisis that has cost over 6 million lives.
“We are not there yet. But the end is in sight,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters at a virtual press conference.
That was the most upbeat assessment from the United Nations agency since it declared an international emergency in January 2020 and started describing COVID-19 as a pandemic three months later.