Indonesia registers first case in Omicron community Coronavirus pandemic News

Health officials say mobility restrictions will increase, especially during the holiday season.

Indonesian health authorities have begun tracing contacts after detecting the first case of rapid local spread in the country. Omicron coronavirus variant.

The infected person is a 37-year-old man from the city of Medan who visited a restaurant in the central business district of the Jakarta capital earlier this month, Health Ministry official Siti Nadia Tarmizi told a news conference on Tuesday.

The man had no foreign or international contact with any of the passengers, Tarmizi said, adding that he was asymptomatic and isolated in a hospital in Jakarta, after initially isolating himself at home.

“With this local transmission we will be tightening mobility restrictions, especially during the Christmas and New Year holidays,” she said, adding that the patient’s wife was negative.

Earlier this month, President Joko Widodo called on authorities to maintain health protocols for people in the world’s fourth-most populous country, after a staff member at an isolation hospital in Jakarta with a foreign travel history said he had a positive variant.

Health authorities say 47 cases of Indonesian Omicron have been confirmed, mostly imported cases of the variant, and experts say the initial investigation is more contagious but more virulent than previous variants.

Indonesia has had one of the worst outbreaks of COVID-19 in Asia, with more than 4.2 million confirmed infections and 144,000 deaths.

But after the cases it peaked in July due to the spread of the highly transmissible Delta variant, they have infections sharply fallen and remained low.