All countries need to wait for an official announcement from the World Health Organization (WHO) to revoke the status of the COVID-19 pandemic in their respective states, according to the Health Ministry.
“(The changes in the) pandemic(‘s status is) declared on a global (scope and authority) by the WHO, and we belong to the (said) global community. After all, we cannot — as a (part of the) global community — say that Indonesia was done with the pandemic,” spokesperson for COVID-19 Vaccination at the Health Ministry, Siti Nadia Tarmizi, stated during a conference on Thursday.
Tarmizi noted that whether Indonesia had entered an endemic phase could not be unilaterally decided, and the government still needed to monitor developments in the situation, including the indicators of COVID-19 handling.
The government is currently striving to improve the situation by cutting down the virus transmission rate among members of the public and ensuring that the death rate and hospital bed occupancy did not spike.
She said that among the efforts a state could make to surmount the epidemic were implementing policies that balance health interests with economic interests in order to enable Indonesia to witness financial growth with the imposition of Community Activities Restriction as an example of one of such efforts.
The spokesperson was upbeat that the restriction policy could effectively reduce the transmission rate if all regional governments partake in the efforts by monitoring travel in their consecutive regions.
Thus, if the state re-implements emergency restrictions or other policies at any time, both levels of governance could cooperate better, and all communities could better understand these rules through appropriate communication.
Tarmizi stated that the government had faith that they could turn this pandemic into an endemic situation, as the current conditions had shown promising control over the pandemic.
Source: Antara News