The government of Batam City, Riau Islands, has banned residents tested positive for COVID-19 to conduct self-isolation at home in order to prevent the likely transmission of the virus to family members.

“Self-isolating (at home), although allowed by the regulation, could potentially spread the virus quickly to other family members,” Deputy Mayor of Batam Amsakar Achmad stated here on Wednesday.

This especially holds relevance, as the Omicron variant, which is currently spreading among members of the community, is more transmissible, he remarked.

According to the Batam government’s record, the Omicron variant constituted 50 percent of the current cases of COVID-19 in the city.

Achmad stated that the policy to forbid residents from self-isolating at home was adopted based on experience in the June-July 2021 period during the peak of COVID-19 transmission in Batam. He noted that several residents opted to self-isolate at home at that time.

After the government made the policy for residents to conduct isolation at the Hajj dormitory, which functioned as an isolation center, the transmission rate was relatively reduced in August 2021.

He assessed that self-isolation at home cannot guarantee that the patient will not transmit the virus to other family members, especially between mothers and children, husbands and wives.

Meanwhile, while undergoing isolation at an isolation center, residents that contract COVID-19 will have to be separated from their families that have tested negative.

Currently, all Batam residents that tested positive for COVID-19 are undergoing isolation in hospitals, including at the Galang Island Special Hospital for Infection (RSKI).

The first case of COVID-19 was confirmed in Indonesia in March 2020. According to data provided by the COVID-19 Handling Task Force, as of February 1, 2022, at least 4,369,391 people have tested positive for COVID-19 in the country, while 4,143,694 people have recovered, and 144,348 people have succumbed to the virus.

The Ministry of Health detected the first case of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 in Indonesia on December 15, 2021.

Source: Antara News