Following reports of a Japanese national who tested positive for COVID-19 having visited Indonesia days before his diagnosis, an official from Indonesia’s Health Ministry today said that the patient was infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which he claims is different from COVID-19.
“The disease we’re facing in this current epidemic is COVID-19. Meanwhile, some experts have said that there is about 70 percent difference between COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 virus,” Achmad Yurianto, secretary of the Health Ministry’s Disease Prevention and Control Directorate, told Kompas.
According to reports, the ministry has been in touch with Japanese health authorities. Achmad also noted how the ministry is still working to find out the correlation between the two viruses.
Further alarming evidence of humanity’s inability to coordinate (especially in an emergency), and also relevant to recent discussions around terminology: ‘A bit chaotic.’ Christening of new coronavirus and its disease name create confusion
This news article has a bizarre story about this: