JAKARTA: Indonesia will impose the boundary of the “emergency” Koronavirus this week to fight a worrying infection surge, President Joko Widodo said Thursday, as the country scrambled to avoid the collapse of an extraordinary health care system.
Widodo said new restrictions, starting on Friday, will last more than two weeks in the capital city of Jakarta and crossed Java who was hit hard, and on the island of Bali holiday, after infection surged to the record level.
New daily cases are a peak of 21,000 per day in a devastated country in Southeast Asia, and the authorities have warned about the spread of variants that are very infected.
“This situation has forced us to take tighter steps …
I have decided to force emergency restrictions,” Widodo said at the National Address Thursday.
Widodo, better known as Jokowi, does not provide details of the steps, which will end July 20.
But a document from Senior Minister Luhut Pandjaitan office said they included all employees who were not important to work from home, while the class would only be held on line.
Shopping centers and mosques in all Muslim majority countries will also be closed in an effort to bring new daily cases to below 10,000, he said.
The Minister is expected to discuss the limit on the press direction later Thursday.
The Indonesian government, widely accused of responding to inadequate against pandemics, has imposed restrictions in the past but not strict locking seen in other countries.
Jokowi previously said that limited steps needed to avoid the largest economy in Southeast Asia.
But hospitals in Jakarta, and in West and Central Java, have been flooded with patients in recent weeks, including those infected with the Delta variant which highly transplanted, which was first identified in India.
Some facilities have been forced to set up a tent outside to deal with the entry and reports of patients who were rejected from an overflowing hospital.
Corony’s official infection Indonesia has increased above 2.1 million with 58,491 deaths.
But real numbers are believed to be much higher because the level of testing is low.
The country aims to inoculate more than 180 million from 270 million people at the beginning of next year, but only about five percent of the population that have been fully vaccinated so far.