Indonesia lifts all COVID curbs, shifts to endemic approach

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Almost three years after officials announced the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Indonesia, the country's leader said Friday they are lifting all coronavirus-related restrictions nationwide.

President Joko Widodo said Indonesia's COVID-19 situation is under control after observing improvements over the past 10 months, allowing the country to abandon the large-scale social restrictions on crowds and people's movement it had adopted in April 2020.

However, Widodo called on people to remain careful and alert as “the pandemic has not ended completely.”

He told a news conference at the presidential palace in the capital, Jakarta, that the use of masks in crowds and closed spaces should continue, though it wouldn't be required.

During the pandemic, instead of implementing a nationwide lockdown, his administration applied two systems: PSBB, which refers to large-scale social restrictions, and then PPKM, a tiered system to curb public mobility.

Both policies were critical in the government's pandemic response.

The PSBB was first imposed in the world's fourth-most populous nation in April 2020, a month after the first case was recorded, as a compromise to growing calls for a stringent lockdown. It was reworked into the emergency PPKM scheme in July 2021, when the delta variant-fuelled second wave of infections swept the country.

The emergency status was then replaced by the four-level PPKM system, which Widodo announced would be abandoned immediately.

A study found that almost all Indonesians have developed antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, boosting confidence that an explosion of cases in Southeast Asia's largest economy could be avoided.

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