Indonesia: who are the “Guardians of Covid-19”?

Text by: Gabrielle Maréchaux Follow

Even before Indonesia announced its first case of coronavirus, suspicion weighed on the figures presented by the government, prompting a band of friends, passionate about data, to act. They are now known as "Guardians of the Covid-19" and are followed by hundreds of thousands of people on social media. The authorities are even starting to consult them.

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From our regional correspondent,

When asked " Who are you ?" " It is sometimes difficult to get a simple answer. When you ask it to a young, informal organization, which moreover answers to the mysterious name of "  Guardians of the Covid-19  " the request could seem even more laborious. But like the structure she co-created, Elina Ciptadi wants to be straightforward and transparent: “ We are basically eleven friends and we consider ourselves data evangelists. "

The formula may surprise, but it allows us to understand what motivation leads these “  Guardians of the Covid-19  ” to perform a time-consuming, tedious and meticulous task for free. Because far from the chivalrous imagination suggested by their names, the members of the group "  Kawal Covid-19  " are struggling, in their personal time and in parallel with their employment, to collect, analyze, format and disseminate all the data potential for the spread of coronavirus in Indonesia.

Work already done for the last Indonesian elections

The work is colossal, but the band of Indonesian friends scattered all over the world, from Jakarta to Tokyo via Seoul or the Netherlands, is not at its first attempt. It has now been six years since, in each presidential and legislative election, they have endeavored to collect similar figures that they can find in order to analyze them and thus ensure the smooth running of the democratic apparatus.

But between the monitoring of the electoral process and the quest for the exact number of patients due to Covid-19, in a country made up of 18,000 islands, which is, moreover, the state which performs the fewest tests in the list of the forty nations more affected by the coronavirus, the methodology had to change, says Elina: “ For the elections, we were mainly looking for only one piece of information, the counting of votes. For the coronavirus, it is now necessary to look at the quantity of officially declared cases, but also of tests, of deaths, to model the hypothetical progression of the virus, it is much more complex. "

And Indonesian federalism, the diversity of this country which has three time zones and 583 languages ​​do not help much in this mission, continues Elina: " In Indonesia, there are huge bureaucratic barriers to overcome in order to get official figures. Add to this that some local governments are more open than others in publishing data. So we listen every day to all the press conferences in the various cities and provinces, we compare the sum of these data with those released by the national government, we compare the two, [and] when there are differences, we cross-check with a other source. "

To analyze the medical data, the eleven friends who were passionate about data processing were also joined by volunteers from the medical field, such as biologists and epidemiologists who in particular enabled them to model the future evolution of the epidemic, while the country has never declared nationwide containment.

The ear of the authorities

In particular, their alarming figures for West Java, one of the densest provinces in the fourth most populous country in the world, prompted the regional governor to take containment measures.

Arguing using models that the province could know up to 70,000 dead by July if there were no restrictive measures, against only 20,000 after the implementation of containment rules , the "  Guardians of Covid-19  " influenced decision-making, officials say. An objective which was not theirs initially but which they are delighted with today: " Originally, we decided to exist to inform the public, not really to inform the government, but if we can bring the government making more decisions based on facts and data is really great. "

Take a place left empty by the government ?

If the group "  Kawal Covid-19  " could thus help the government in the management of the coronavirus, at the beginning of the crisis, it even seemed to supply it. Because while the first official cases of coronavirus appeared in Singapore, Malaysia and the neighboring Philippines from January and February, for long weeks the Indonesian government assured that the country was spared the pandemic , thanks in particular, according to some ministers, to prayers Indonesians or tropical climate.

Suspicious certainty questioned as far as the United States, where Harvard public health researchers published an investigation proving that this was statistically impossible in view of the many human and merchant flows between China, the cradle of the virus, and the archipelago. But even after the initial denial period, the manner of reporting the first cases continued to be questionable, since the authorities refused to inform in which provinces they were located, and their exact number, so they justified by thereafter, not to cause panic.

32,000 subscribers in just 24 hours

Filling a void, with their daily information analyzed and sourced, the group  "  Kawal Covid-19  " generated an audience that they did not expect. " On Twitter, 24 hours after launching our page, we already had 32,000 followers, " recalls Elina. With now 162,000 followers on Instagram , a hundred thousand others on Twitter and Facebook , the group has today gained popularity it had never encountered when monitoring the elections.

And in parallel with the growing number of subscribers, some 800 people also volunteered to assist the group of quickly overwhelmed friends, who thus benefited from a wide variety of skills, ranging from historians to graphic designers, web developers, translators, editor or shrink. As for when it will all stop, Elina Ciptadi assures with thoughtful calm: " We are waiting for the day when our voice will no longer be necessary, so that we can once again focus on our jobs, our families, but I'm afraid it won't happen for a long time. "

►Read also: Coronavirus: those Asian countries that lag behind the Covid-19

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