Longer lockdown as Jakarta boosts contact tracing, quarantine facilities

A partial lockdown has been extended in Indonesia, as plans are being finalised to ramp up contact tracing and reinforce quarantine facilities in the country to deal with the highly infectious Delta variant which has seen it turn into the epicentre of the Covid-19 pandemic in Asia.

From today, a digital contact tracing system will be adopted, and field personnel deployed to work with community clinics and local health departments across the country.

A total of 7,000 graduates of health vocational schools have been trained to be contact tracers, based on World Health Organisation learning modules, and they will be supplemented by thousands more from the military and police force.

All will serve as the backbone of operations, which will see close contacts of those who test positive ushered to centralised isolation or self-isolation at home with better monitoring by the community, said an official who attended a government coordination meeting on Covid-19 last Friday.

"We will be doing this to curb the transmission of the Delta variant. We will reduce the spread significantly," senior minister Luhut Pandjaitan, who chaired the meeting, was quoted as saying by the official.

Mr Luhut has been tasked by President Joko Widodo to coordinate efforts to contain the spread of the virus in Java and Bali, as well as 15 regions including in Sumatra and Kalimantan. Java and Bali account for more than 60 per cent of the confirmed Covid-19 cases in the world's fourth-most-populous country, which has so far reported more than 3.16 million infections and over 83,000 deaths.

The daily average of Covid-19 deaths in the past week has been about seven times the figure in the second week of June, when the government, for the first time, confirmed that the Delta variant first detected in India was found in Indonesia. The country recently overtook India and Brazil as a global Covid-19 hot spot.

Last night, Mr Widodo announced he had decided to extend the ongoing partial lockdown in several regions, which had led to the suspension of most activities and closure of non-essential public places, including malls, places of worship and parks, since July 3.

The lockdown, which was due to end yesterday, has been extended to Aug 2 with minor adjustments, including allowing dining in for up to 20 minutes at open-air sidewalk food stalls.

Under the tighter restrictions, all non-essential workers have to work from home, while up to 50 per cent of those working in essential sectors, including banks, the stock market and hotels, will be put on staggered shifts. Restaurants can provide only takeaway and delivery services.

Those who attended the meeting last Friday also discussed whether a white flag should be used to mark homes where people were self-isolating, to ensure better monitoring by the community.

Centralised quarantine facilities must be manned by two or three doctors and a team of nurses. The minimum number of doctors and nurses was expected to be firmed up at a meeting last night.

Indonesia's military chief Hadi Tjahjanto was quoted as saying: "We want to make sure each centralised isolation location has ample medical equipment, doctors, nurses and food. Otherwise, people do not want to come."

Air Chief Marshal Hadi said he and the head of the disaster management agency, Mr Ganip Warsito, would from Saturday begin visiting centralised quarantine centres in Java and Bali.

The 38 cities and regencies in East Java, one of the provinces discussed during the meeting, have between one and nine centralised quarantine centres. Each centre can accommodate between 70 and 410 patients.