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JAKARTA, Indonesia – Indonesia’s resort island of Bali has launched a self-service vaccination campaign targeting thousands of hospitality workers as the popular tourist destination reopens its eyes to foreign visitors.
Billed as the first campaign of its kind in Southeast Asia, Bali vehicle vaccinations kicked off over the weekend. The program aims to vaccinate some 5,000 workers in shared transport and hospitality services by the end of this month.
The campaign was launched at the Nusa Dua Bali Convention Center in Bali’s capital Denpasar, and was established in partnership with Southeast Asian rideshare giant Grab.
“This drive-thru program is good, because for us drivers who work on the streets every day, we are very vulnerable to being exposed to the virus,” Zul Widodo, a transport driver, told AFP.
In August, Bali closed the door to foreign tourists over coronavirus concerns, hitting its key tourism sector.
“The COVID-19 vaccine is critical to the recovery of Indonesia’s tourism industry,” Tourism Minister Sandiaga Uno said in a statement over the weekend.
“The availability of vaccines remains a source of hope for people to return to normalcy and increase confidence that they can travel safely.”
The island has registered some 923 deaths and just over 34,000 cases of the virus.
Drive-thru vaccination was implemented alongside Indonesia’s nationwide vaccination offering, which began in January with the Chinese CoronaVac (Sinovac) coups.
Indonesia, the fourth most populous nation in the world, plans to vaccinate more than 180 million of its nearly 270 million people.
But it was not clear if the drive-thru program would be implemented in other cities in the archipelago.
Indonesia’s economy, the largest in Southeast Asia, has entered recession during a pandemic that has infected more than 1.3 million people and killed more than 36,000 across the country, according to official data, although the casualties Test rates indicate that the numbers could be much higher. – French Media Agency
