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Indonesia prepares road map to endemic status as virus wanes
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Travelers walk through the international arrivals hall at Ngurah Rai International Airport in Tuban near Denpasar, Bali, on Feb. 16, 2022, after a Singapore Airlines flight arrived following a nearly two-year break due to COVID-19. (AFP/Sonny Tumbelaka)
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s the Omicron-fueled surge of infections begins to wane in Indonesia, the government has announced a plan to create an outline to help the country's transition to endemicity and return to normal life after two years of battling the COVID-19 pandemic.
Health Ministry spokesperson Siti Nadia Tarmizi said authorities were working together with independent epidemiologists and other experts to develop the so-called "road map to endemicity".
“Although COVID-19 infections in the country are not yet completely under control, sooner or later it will eventually shift to an endemic phase. We’ll create this road map so that we can be well prepared to live with the coronavirus," Nadia told The Jakarta Post on Monday.
In broad terms, a pandemic stage is when an illness is spreading quickly across the globe and is posing a danger to the safety of the masses. An illness becomes endemic when the rates become static in a given geographical location, meaning that the pathogen causing the disease is likely to remain in circulation without causing large outbreaks.
Nadia said the road map would consist of three main stages: the deceleration phase, during which cases gradually declined for a long period of time; the pre-pandemic phase for when infections were brought under control; and finally the endemic phase.
She said the government was currently setting epidemiological parameters for each phase, including the benchmark for testing positivity rates, virus reproduction rates (Rt), hospitalizations and deaths. These indicators will be important as groundwork to further ease restrictions.
"For COVID-19 to be declared an endemic, the virus’ effective reproduction [Rt] number must decrease below 1, hospital bed occupancy rates must stand below 5 percent, and the positivity rate must stand below 1 percent, among other things,” Nadia said.
