By September 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic in Indonesia was made worse by the circulation of rumors among news broadcasts and social media users. Hospitals and medical workers were accused of seeking to make profit from the outbreak by falsifying the data of patients infected with COVID-19. The hospital would reportedly receive tens or even hundreds of millions of rupiah from the government for treating COVID-19 patients, hence the false Covid-19 diagnoses to claim by uncooperative doctors or hospitals. More malicious news emerged that some hospitals deliberately manipulated the data by declaring the number of mortalities caused by or linked to coronavirus. Also circulating virally, were news about family members of the dead who had been asked to declare that the patient was infected by the virus and the hospital would then give compensation for this false, corrupt, and criminal countersigning.

This issue was complicated by disagreements surrounding the COVID-19 funeral protocols. There were cases where the patients had been claimed dead of COVID-19 and buried under the COVID-19 protocols before the test results came out. Complaints often came from the victims’ family who refused Covid-19 protocols for fear of ostracization from their neighbors.

Given the incident, the government revised the definition of a patient who died of Covid-19 or otherwise by applying stricter regulations and better verifications of the number and causes of mortalities in hospital reports.

This case was perpetuated by the different interests between the hospital and the victim's family. One the one hand, death of COVID-19 is a stigma often hard to bear by the family and this psychological burden is more unpleasant than the disease itself. On the other hand, the government would pay for the entire cost from treatment to funeral cost should one die of COVID-19. Suspicion of each other frequently happened here. The patient’s family alleged that the hospital had taken advantage of the situation.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Health had issued Statement of Absolute Responsibility (known as SPTJM) for the hospital management to sign in to avoid discrepancy in the number of claims and the examination/audit by the Government Internal Apparatus Audit. This is done in order to reduce moral hazard from referral hospitals in dealing with the COVID-19 patients.

Presidential Chief of Staff Moeldoko following met Central Java Governor Ganjar Pranowo in Semarang to talk over this false claim and blaming game. Moeldoko was skeptical regarding the number of death declared to have been caused by COVOD-19. He was certain that not all deaths were caused by COVID-19.  In search of clarification, he called for medical “redefinition” in order to avoid loopholes that could be exploited to the benefit of certain parties. In support of Moeldoko’s claim, Ganjar reported that false COVID-19 diagnoses had been made in Central Java.

“Such a thing has happened in Central Java. There were people diagnosed for COVID-19 and then died before their test results came back,” he said. “It turned out that their test results came back negative. It was unfortunate, […] we need to address this issue.”