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JAKARTA – Indonesia’s enforcement of its ban on the annual Hari Raya Idul Fitri exodus takes on additional importance, as a series of Covid-19 broadcasts have been linked to those who returned home earlier.
A poll cited by the government said 7 percent of people had gone home early, before the ban.
The cases include a 72-year-old grandfather in Klaten, Central Java, who contracted the disease from his grandson who returned from Jakarta in the middle of last month, according to media reports.
Late last month, a man who showed symptoms of Covid-19 died in Cilacap, Central Java. Local authorities said the man had no history of traveling to any red light district, where there are many infections, but that his younger brother had returned from Jakarta with seven other people, all of whom tested positive.
In the same month, a two-year-old baby in Garut, West Java, contracted the virus from his father, another returnee from Jakarta.
Despite the nationwide ban on mudik, or the annual exodus back to home cities before Hari Raya Idul Fitri, Indonesians have been caught trying to sneak home by hiding in truck containers and bus trunks. This occurs even when criminals are subject to fines of up to Rs 100 million (S $ 9,450) and up to one year in prison.
The mudik ban, Idul Fitri, falls on May 23 and 24 of this year, came into effect on April 24 and aims to curb the spread of the coronavirus from Jakarta, the epicenter of the outbreak and other high-risk regions to the rest. from the country. vast archipelago
But just days after it was announced, police caught a couple hiding under boxes of fish biscuits in a truck on their way to Bengkulu in Sumatra. They were detained in Banten province, approximately half of their starting point in Semarang, Central Java.
In another case, a ruse from a family of five had to hide in a minivan that had allegedly stalled and get a truck to transport it to a service station. The Jakarta family was shooting for Central Java.
Last year 7.2 million people made their way from Greater Jakarta to their hometowns in the western, central and eastern parts of Java and Sumatra in the week before Idul Fitri, making this the most common route. busy. Around 19.5 million people made the trip home last year through Indonesia.
The mudik ban came after an appeal for people to stay was not widely accepted enough: 24 percent of people still wanted to go home in the middle of the outbreak, according to the survey cited by the government.
The fear is that outbreaks in more distant cases on the island of Java may be a burden on health centers in the less developed regions of the country.
The government has increased capacity by opening a 1,800-bed Covid-19 Emergency Hospital in late March, adding to the 3,249 beds and 1,083 isolation rooms, which can hold up to four people each, in hospitals in Java.
But this is unlikely to be enough in Java, where 150 million of the country’s 270 million inhabitants reside.
“Java’s hospital infrastructure is the highest in terms of the number of beds and doctors. But if the outbreak worsens, given the size of the population, the infrastructure is not enough,” economist Chatib Basri said in a recent conference call with investors.
Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation, recorded 533 new coronavirus cases on Saturday (May 9), bringing the overall number of infections to 13,645. It also saw 16 other deaths, bringing the total deaths to 959, the highest in Southeast Asia.
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