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Indonesia's quarantine vs investments conundrum
As Indonesia is in the grip of a Omicron wave, maintaining quarantine for all international travelers, regardless of whether they are infected or not, could be doing more harm than good for the country's future investments and economic recovery.
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In isolation: An asymptomatic COVID-19 patient is seen through the window of Hotel U Stay in West Jakarta, on Wednesday. The hotel is being used to quarantine asymptomatic and minor-symptomatic COVID-19 patients from West Jakarta and South Jakarta. (JP/P.J. Leo)
I
have been in love with Indonesia for number of years, pooling my resources with a fierce determination to start a medium-sized business here, with a hope to eventually grow it into something bigger. Then COVID-19 struck, and things kept getting worse.
Determined not be fazed by that, and armed with undying admiration for the society and culture of a country I have come to consider as a second home, I kept making my probing trips to try and set up something which would cement my connection with Indonesia. That is, until the mandatory quarantine started.
I concur that quarantines are essential in certain circumstances to prevent importing contagions. However, there is a flip side to the coin. Even though stringent quarantine procedures were in place, Delta still arrived in Indonesia and now, so has Omicron. With community spread of this extremely transmissible variant documented in Indonesia, it is quite debatable whether locking up foreigners or Indonesians returning from aboard would be of any use in containing this outbreak.
This is a virus that will keep spreading once it has entered a country, regardless of whether more infected travelers arrive. Community spread will be a hundred, maybe a thousand, times faster than any importation of the virus would entail. Ultimately, as the global experience has shown, vaccination is the key.
That is precisely why countries with high vaccination rates like the United Kingdom have dropped quarantine procedures altogether for fully vaccinated travelers. Thailand and Turkey are also opening their borders to tourists. They would not have made these decisions without the calculated risk of Omicron not being as deadly as previously thought.
One recalls the hue and cry a couple of months ago, when the media was passing off Omicron as more potent than Delta. We live in a changed world, and without robust scientific evidence, such panic inevitably impacts on people’s lives in a different but also equally deadly way as the virus.
Take Bali, for instance. It has been economically bleeding to death for the past couple of years. Even when the Indonesian government opened up so-called visas for foreign tourists, who are Bali’s lifeline, less than a hundred arrived. Why?
