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Families urged not to host gatherings as new clusters emerge
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omen’s Empowerment and Child Protection Minister Bintang Puspayoga has urged families to avoid hosting or attending family gatherings.
“We highly recommend that all families in Indonesia refrain from taking part in large family gatherings amid the pandemic,” Bintang said as quoted by kompas.com on Thursday.
Bintang suggested that families instead interact with each other online.
She said she had been summoned by President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo following the emergence of COVID-19 infection clusters in families.
Jokowi instructed her to continue proclaiming the importance of upholding health protocols in public, especially within extended families.
“Our campaign includes promoting the importance of wearing masks, washing hands and maintaining physical distance. This needs to be [communicated on a massive scale] with the help of those who focus on women’s issues and Family Welfare Movement [PKK] members,” Bintang said.
She advised people to wear masks inside their homes, especially if some family members are particularly vulnerable.
“Women as the household managers should always remind their family members to wear masks at all times, even inside the house,” she said.
Previously, the COVID-19 task force in Depok, West Java, revealed that the region had seen new family clusters that had been caused by residents working outside of Depok and bringing the virus home.
An official of the Jakarta Tourism and Creative Economy Agency said the agency would disperse public wedding receptions held in the capital city amid the large-scale social restrictions (PSBB) policy.
“If there is a report of a wedding ceremony, we will take strict measures against it,” the agency's tourism industry division head, Bambang Ismadi, said on Thursday as quoted by kompas.com.
He acknowledged that some citizens had secretly held receptions during the PSBB period, and the events ended up becoming new clusters of COVID-19 transmission.
During the PSBB period, the Jakarta administration bans residents from holding public wedding receptions, allowing them only to hold a small ceremony at religious affairs offices (KUA) or civil registry offices.
Epidemiologist Dewi Nur Aisyah, a member of the expert team with the national COVID-19 task force, confirmed that Jakarta had seen new coronavirus clusters, including wedding reception clusters.
Data published on corona.jakarta.go.id showed that as of Thursday morning, 15 people had tested positive for COVID-19 from a wedding cluster in Penggilingan subdistrict in East Jakarta and five people from a wedding cluster in Kebon Pala subdistrict, East Jakarta.
The other new clusters are hotel clusters, Islamic boarding school clusters and night club clusters. Jakarta has recorded a total of 67,638 infections since March, with 13,232 active cases and 52,742 recoveries as of Friday. The city has had 1,664 fatalities linked to COVID-19 so far. (dpk/aly)
