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JAKARTA (Reuters) – A Catholic church in Indonesia has decorated a Christmas tree with protective masks and hand sanitizers as a way to spread awareness of COVID-19 in the holiday season, as the daily death toll in the country hit a record on Sunday.
“The tree was made with the intention of making people aware of the importance of maintaining health protocols,” Markus Marcelinus Hardo Iswanto, from the parish of The Catholic Church of Christ the King in Indonesia’s second largest city, told Reuters. , Surabaya.
Starting with a bamboo skeleton, church followers and the local Muslim community decorated the tree with hundreds of colorful masks and donated hand sanitizers, and it took a week to complete the three-meter tree, he said.
Christmas is a public holiday in Indonesia, which has the largest Muslim population in the world, but is celebrated by only about 10% of its 270 million people.
The government has urged the public to avoid celebrating Christmas and the New Year in public places due to the increase in COVID-19 cases.
The country reported a record 221 daily deaths on Sunday, bringing the total number of deaths in the Southeast Asian nation so far to 19,880, data from the national COVID-19 task force showed.
Indonesia has the highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Southeast Asia at 664,930, as well as the highest number of related deaths in the region.
(Written by Angie Teo; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
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