Dio Suhenda

The Jakarta Post/ Jakarta

Wednesday marks two years since the government reported Indonesia’s first COVID-19 cases. The second year, which brought the country to a grim tally of some 5.5 million infections and 148,000 deaths, was marked with changes in restrictions and headway in vaccinations.

Indonesia saw its first COVID-19 wave culminate in a peak of 14,518 daily cases in January 2021, prompting the government to introduce public activity restrictions (PPKM).

The first vaccination drive kicked off in the same month, with jabs first given to medical frontliners and then the elderly – a population thought to be especially vulnerable in the pandemic.

However, as vaccinations were expanded to the wider population in late June, with shots becoming available to children aged 12 to 17 in July, the Delta variant began to wreak havoc.

Read also: Yearender 2021: Foreign variants spell trouble for Indonesia’s coronavirus response

It had taken 14 months for Indonesia to exceed the 50,000 fatality mark at the end of May 2021, but the Delta surge killed as many people in a little over nine weeks, doubling the death toll by August 2021.

The country’s health system was pushed to the brink of collapse and a set of more stringent activity curbs – dubbed the emergency PPKM policy – was introduced.

Daily infections gradually dropped to reach the low hundreds in December 2021. In the same month, vaccinations became available for children aged 5 to 11. 

But another coronavirus variant, Omicron, soon sparked a third wave of infections at the start of 2022. A booster vaccination program was launched around the same time.

Omicron broke the country’s daily new cases record – with 64,718 new infections recorded on Feb. 16 – but led to relatively low death rates when compared to the Delta surge.

Indonesia was able to face the Omicron surge with a bolstered – and more prepared – health system, more hospital beds and higher vaccination rates. 

Around 144 million people – 69 percent of the country’s target population or just over half of the country’s total population – have been vaccinated. Another 10 million have received booster shots.

Jabs for the elderly, however, continue to lag as only 11 million have been vaccinated, or 54 percent of the target population in this age group.

Read also: Govt still cautious on case spike, maintains curbs  

Transition 

The country’s caseload is currently on a downward trend, with 25,054 and 24,728 new infections reported on Monday and Tuesday, respectively – down from 61,488 new cases on Feb. 23.

Even with a less deadly third wave, Coordinating Maritime Affairs and Investment Minister Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan said Indonesia still needed to improve its vaccination rates, restrain infections, increase the capacity of its healthcare system and boost coronavirus surveillance.

“Both the government and the public need to ensure that all these efforts will also be supplemented by enough education, so that ‘living with COVID-19’ will not just be a slogan,” Luhut said during a press briefing on Sunday.

While welcoming these goals, experts are calling on the government to do more and set higher targets.

Tjandra Yoga Aditama, a professor at the University of Indonesia's (UI) School of Medicine, said the government needed to focus on lowering the country’s positivity rate to under 5 percent and case reproduction number to be below 1 percent in order for Indonesia to have a better grip on the coronavirus.

The transition of COVID-19 from a pandemic to an endemic disease, Tjandra pointed out, could only be declared by the World Health Organization.

Epidemiologist Dicky Budiman of Griffith University warned Indonesia against following the steps of other countries that had declared their post-pandemic statuses.

“Unless Indonesia resigns from the WHO, we still have an obligation [to follow] the public health emergency status,” Dicky said on Monday.

Vaccine development

In its efforts to produce Indonesia’s own vaccine, the government has missed some of its targets.

A national consortium tasked in 2020 with developing and ultimately producing Indonesia’s own Merah Putih vaccine needed more time than expected.

Read also: Indonesia begins clinical trials of homegrown COVID-19 candidate vaccine 

While the initial production target of mid-2021 was missed, phase one of clinical trials for the Merah Putih vaccine began last month.

Airlangga University and partner PT Biotis Pharmaceuticals, who developed the candidate vaccine, said that if the clinical trials were successful, they could start mass producing by July or August.

Indonesia has also been included in the WHO vaccine technology transfer initiative, which will see the country receiving technical support from the WHO’s global messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology transfer hub in South Africa to manufacture its own mRNA vaccines.

Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi said Indonesia’s inclusion in the initiative would allow it to serve Southeast Asia’s future needs for mRNA vaccines and increase vaccine equity – an issue for which the country has long campaigned, particularly during its presidency over the Group of 20 this year.

Read also: Indonesia gets WHO’s support in mRNA vaccine production 

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