The Minister Of Home Affairs Emphasizes 3 Principles To Prevent The Spread Of The Omicron Variant, What Are They?

JAKARTA - The Minister of Home Affairs, Muhammad Tito Karnavian, emphasized three principles to deal with the new variant of the pandemic, Omicron.

In his statement received in Jakarta, Friday, he said the three principles were enforcing health protocols (prokes), conducting tracing and tracking, and accelerating vaccinations.

"So we principle (to carry out) enforcement of health procedures, then once again tracing and tracking, and finally accelerating vaccination," he said as quoted by Antara, Friday, December 17.

He stated that the regional COVID-19 task force will use the spike gene target failure (SGTF) method as well as the whole genome sequences (WGS) machine to confirm whether a patient is infected with Omicron or not.

"Later, in each (COVID-19) area, there will be a methodology called SGTF, so you don't have to use the WGS machine," he said.

He also emphasized that anyone who is positive must immediately do tracking and tracing. Regional heads are asked to facilitate this when there are people who are confirmed positive for Omicron.

Then, he also asks local governments to accelerate vaccination. Because, to this day, the government does not know exactly about the character of Omicron, for example regarding the severity of its transmission.

Currently, he said, the research process in Indonesia and the world is currently underway regarding the variant.

"That's why we came here (West Sumatra) specifically to talk about the acceleration of vaccination, because some cases that have been vaccinated with Omicron are not severe, some even have very low symptoms," he said.