The government is seeking to facilitate more passenger travel by using a diagnostics tool for COVID-19 at airports and other transport hubs, which, despite a lack of peer-reviewed data on its effectiveness, offers cheaper health screening that is expected to spur traffic.

GeNose, a coronavirus breathalyzer invented by Gadjah Mada University (UGM) researchers, has been in use at airports around the country since the start of this month.

As of Friday, the tests have been on offer at five major airports: I Gusti Ngurah Rai International Airport in Bali, Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin II International Airport in South Sumatra, Husein Sastranegara International Airport in West Java, Yogyakarta International Airport and Juanda International Airport in East Java.

The reason for its swift rollout, despite some reservations from its developers, is to help jumpstart travel and tourism at a time when flight operators are struggling to draw in domestic travelers and bounce back from the pandemic.

According to data from Statistics Indonesia (BPS), the number of domestic flight passengers nosedived due to the coronavirus outbreak, leading to an annual decline of 67.01 percent to 1.91 million passengers in February.

“The use of GeNose is expected to give the public access to a more comfortable and affordable COVID-19 screening [method] for travel on all modes of transportation,” Transportation Ministry spokesperson Adita Irawati told The Jakarta Post via text message on Tuesday.

She said the government planned to gradually expand the use of the breathalyzer to other airports while it would evaluate developments at places where they were currently in use.

Read also: Four Indonesian airports to trial GeNose coronavirus breath tests starting April 1

The introduction of GeNose at airports follows a similarly massive rollout at 44 train stations since Feb. 5. As of April 10, around 500,000 train passengers have taken the test, Transportation Minister Budi Karya Sumadi has said.

Each test costs an affordable Rp 40,000 (US$2.73), much cheaper than the rapid antigen test or the gold standard polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test that can cost hundreds of thousands of rupiah.

GeNose test results are also near instantaneous; a person can find out whether or not they are reactive up to 10 minutes after they exhale into a plastic bag fitted with the device, which is quicker than other alternatives that can take up to hours or even days for results to come back.

State-owned airport operator Angkasa Pura I, which manages the Ngurah Rai, Yogyakarta and Juanda airports, provided enough GeNose kits to test 20 percent of daily passengers at each airport, says Gede Eka Sandi, senior secretary manager for stakeholders and the board of directors at AP I.

At the Ngurah Rai airport, for instance, the company offers roughly 800 GeNose bags, which account for one fifth of the average number of daily passengers, or around 4,000 people. But the actual number of daily users of the breathalyzers average around 500 passengers per airport.

As its next move, the firm, which operates a total of 15 airports nationwide, plans to start using GeNose test kits at the Sultan Aji Muhammad Sulaiman Sepinggan International Airport in Balikpapan, East Kalimantan. It expects to use breathalyzers at all of its airports by May.

“We hope it makes for a convenient alternative in the services we offer for flight requirements,” Eka told The Jakarta Post in a phone interview on Tuesday.

“Our hope is that GeNose can spur traffic.”

But the method is not without its quirks; Eka said passengers were required to fast 30 minutes before taking a breath test to minimize chances of getting a false positive. If a passenger is found to be reactive, they are asked to take a rapid antigen or PCR test and then sent to hospital.

Read also: Doubts linger over GeNose COVID-19 breathalyzer

The GeNose test kit mimics the human nose to detect volatile organic compounds in a single breath sample, which a user exhales into the designated plastic bag.

Researchers claim the VOCs detected are specific to people with COVID-19, but there is currently no peer-reviewed publication of the trials to support this.

Experts have voiced concerns about the lack of scientific studies on the GeNose mechanism, but one of its developers insisted the pandemic had necessitated swift action and that there was pressure “from above” to quickly roll out the test kits.

Tourism and Creative Economy Minister Sandiaga Uno said this week that the government planned to expand the use of GeNose to Soekarno-Hatta International Airport – known colloquially as Soetta – in Banten in May.

He also said he was planning to raise the breath test capacity at Ngurah Rai airport in Bali, the nation’s biggest tourist destination.

The two airports are the country’s busiest.

“I fully support it given the high level of mobility at Soetta. So the addition of GeNose tests will facilitate airplane passengers and tourists,” Sandiaga said in a virtual briefing on Monday.

The number of domestic passengers at Soekarno-Hatta was down by nearly 69 percent year-on-year at just 482,132 passengers in February, according to BPS data. Ngurah Rai booked an even steeper 79.52 percent decline yoy in the same period, seeing only 71,049 passengers.

For all the support the government has thrown behind the patented diagnostic tool, GeNose still draws concerns from the public regarding its accuracy, despite booking a reported 97 percent accuracy rate from a trial last year.

Read also: UGM receives orders for GeNose COVID-19 detector

Housewife Rosmalina said she was not planning to use the GeNose again in the future after she mistakenly tested as reactive for COVID-19.

She had taken the test on March 20 at Gambir Station in Central Jakarta prior to her planned departure to Semarang, Central Java. She then took a rapid antigen test that came back negative, suggesting that her breath test gave her a false positive.

“I do not want to use GeNose again,” Rosmalina told the Post in a phone interview on Tuesday. “I am that kind of person who will not do the same thing once I cannot trust it.”

 — Eisya Eloksari contributed to this story.