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Indonesia to ramp up testing, tracing ahead of reopening
A number of regions will be eligible to ease restrictions if they show improvements in COVID-19 case numbers as well as the transmission rate and the “psychological state of the people”.
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Healthcare workers take swab samples from COVID-19 patients at the emergency room of the Cengkareng Regional General Hospital in Jakarta on June 23. (Antara/Fauzan)
T
he government has pledged to roll out mass testing, tracing, treatment and vaccinations across several densely-populated agglomeration areas around the country in a bid to improve its national data on COVID-19, which officials say would become the basis for relaxing community mobility restrictions in various regions.
Indonesia’s COVID-19 data landscape has been fraught with issues of reliability, which officials have pinned on several regional administrations that have not been forthcoming about their data on case numbers, bed occupancy rates and testing samples, among other figures.
Epidemiologists also believe the nation has severely underreported its COVID-19 data, and that any official figures make up a small part of the actual numbers.
But now the government has provided some indication that it is attempting to improve its data collection, with President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo announcing a plan to relax emergency public activity restrictions (PPKM Darurat) as early as next week, which he said would be predicated on the steady decline of certain indicators.
Coordinating Maritime Affairs and Investment Minister Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan followed up the announcement the following day by replacing the alphabet soup of previous curbs with a four-tier system of community mobility restrictions (PPKM I–IV) based on standards set out by the World Health Organization (WHO).
According to the President’s instruction, Luhut said, a number of regions would be eligible to ease restrictions from Monday if they managed to show improvements in COVID-19 case numbers as well as the transmission rate, responsiveness of the healthcare system and the “psychological state of the people”.
“We’ll be looking at all the data so that by July 26, several areas would be able to relax [curbs] and gradually reopen — but only if they demonstrate improvements on all sides, especially a decline in cases and WHO parameters,” the senior minister said during a press briefing on Wednesday.
