“I am excited at the prospect that the pandemic might soon be over,” the 54-year-old said on Wednesday. “But personally, I will keep on wearing face masks, since the point of it is to protect myself and those around me.”

Meanwhile, 23-year-old Hizkia Kenya of North Jakarta feels conflicted about the newly eased rule. “Yes, I’m happy that cases are declining. But I am also afraid that cases might rise again if people start to disregard the other health protocols,” he said.

President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo announced that people are no longer required to wear masks in outdoor settings starting Wednesday, saying that the COVID-19 pandemic is becoming “more controlled” as the country continues to ease its health protocols.

“[For] outdoor activities or in open areas that are not crowded with people, people are allowed to not wear masks. However, for activities in closed spaces and public transportation, masks are still mandatory,” the President announced on Tuesday in a livestreamed video on the Sekretariat Presiden YouTube channel.

Jokowi stressed, however, that vulnerable people, including the elderly and those with comorbidities, should still wear a mask in public.

He also announced that Indonesia’s travel rules would no longer require fully vaccinated domestic and international travelers to present a COVID-19 test result to enter the country.

In a separate video on the Sekretariat President channel also livestreamed on Tuesday, Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin told a press conference that the relaxed mask-wearing policy was the first sign that COVID-19 in Indonesia was headed toward endemicity.

“We always do benchmarking with other countries and we see that in almost all countries, the mask policy is specifically for indoor [areas],” Budi said, wearing a mask throughout the virtual press event. He added that people could “take off their masks outdoors”.

Budi said that high herd immunity against the COVID-19 virus warranted the relaxation, citing the Health Ministry’s serology survey in March that involved 2,100 respondents in Java and Bali.

The survey showed that 99 percent of the respondents had developed antibodies against the virus, either through vaccination or infection, up from 93 percent in a serology survey conducted in December 2021, just before the Omicron wave started.

Budi also explained that the average antibody level (titer) of each respondent in the March survey had shown a significant increase compared to the levels measured in the December survey, from 500-600 titers to 7,000-8,000 titers.

“This is because many Indonesians have been vaccinated or were infected during Omicron. And, research around the world has shown that the combination of vaccination plus infection forms what is called super immunity,” the minister said.

Caution still necessary

The government has been easing its COVID-19 restrictions amid the country’s declining daily caseload, which has hovered below 1,000 cases for the past month and below 500 for the past week. Wednesday saw only 327 new cases, a mere fraction compared to the 64,000 new cases reported on Feb. 16, the peak of the Omicron wave.

Despite the declining trend in transmission, health experts have said the government needs to proceed with caution in easing the COVID-19 curbs.

Epidemiologist Dicky Budiman at Griffith University, Australia, said Indonesia should not follow other countries in dropping the mask requirement just yet, given its sluggish booster dose rollout.

Although the number of booster doses administered had spiked over the recent Idul Fitri holiday, Health Ministry data showed that only 43 million people, or just 14.8 percent of the country’s 270 million population, had received their booster shots.

In comparison, the United States and United Kingdom, which had dropped their mask rules, had administered more booster doses per 100 people. As of May 10 according to Our World in Data, 30 out of every 100 people in the US had received their booster doses, while the UK had administered boosters to 57 out of 100 people.

“Indonesia’s [booster dose coverage] is not as wide compared to several other countries. That’s why we need to be wise and not rush” to ease the mask-wearing policy, Dicky told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday. He emphasized that the eased policy should have been trialed first, instead of immediately implementing it nationwide.

Separately, public health expert Tjandra Yoga Aditama said the government’s decision to drop the mask requirement should be accompanied by increased testing and tracing as well as whole genomic sequencing (WGS) to detect new variants.

“We need to closely monitor this new regulation by having more [COVID-19] tests. So, if there is a spike [in cases], we can reevaluate the mask policy,” he said.

As for Danny, continuing to don a mask had other uses than protecting against COVID-19. “It also helps filter out Jakarta’s air pollution,” he said.