The government has announced a change in the quarantine period for international arrivals to five days.
The change is planned to take place from Friday 4th February.
This provision applies to those who have been fully vaccinated. Overseas travellers who have only been vaccinated with one dose must still be quarantined for seven days.
“There needs to be a change in strategy in line with the high number of cases due to local transmission. For this reason, the government has changed the quarantine from seven days to five days with a note that Indonesian citizens and foreigners who enter Indonesia must have complete vaccines,” explained the Coordinator of PPKM for Java and Bali Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan, in a press conference on Monday 31st January 2022.
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“This policy is implemented considering that most of the international travellers are bringing the Omicron variant, which various studies have shown that the incubation period for this variant is in the range of three days,” he said.
This is based on the latest research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States and several other studies. Furthermore, the government assessed that the transmission of the Omicron variant in Indonesia did not only come from imported cases but is being locally transmitted, so a new strategy was needed.
Meanwhile, the COVID-19 Emergency Hospital (RSDC) Wisma Atlet Kemayoran noted that 4,590 patients exposed to the coronavirus had been hospitalized as of Monday 31st January.
The head of the COVID-19 Task Force and Executive Board of the Indonesian Doctors Association (IDI), Zubairi Djoerban, considers the third wave of coronavirus cases to have occurred in Indonesia.
Djoerban said the transmission rate or positivity rate and hospital occupancy were increasing. The daily positivity rate for PCR and molecular rapid test (TCM) examinations reached 23.93 percent.