School Children In Tangerang Back To Online Learning, COVID-19 Transmission Cases Continue To Rise

JAKARTA - The Tangerang City Government has temporarily suspended face-to-face learning activities at the early childhood education level to junior high school starting Wednesday, January 26 tomorrow. This is because there has been an increase in the number of COVID-19 cases.

Tangerang Mayor Arief R Wismansyah said teaching and learning activities at the early childhood education level to junior high school will be carried out remotely via online.

"The increase in cases in the last few days has been quite drastic, so to take care of children, starting tomorrow the teaching and learning process will be online again for a while," said Arief at the Tangerang City Government Center, Tuesday, January 25, quoted from Antara.

"Hopefully the case can be dropped soon, and the children can go back to school," he said.

The mayor explained that the decision to temporarily suspend face-to-face learning activities in schools was taken based on the results of the evaluation of the full face-to-face learning implementation and input from medical professional organizations.

The head of the Tangerang City Health Office, Dini Anggraeni, previously said that cases of COVID-19 transmission had increased again in Tangerang City.

"Tangerang City daily cases at the beginning of the year were only in single digits, the highest was only seven cases. In the last two weeks, the numbers continue to increase to double digits and now there are hundreds of cases per day. Don't take it lightly," he said.

As an illustration, according to data from the Tangerang City Health Office on January 12, 2022, there were only 17 cases of COVID-19, but on January 23, 2022 the number was up to 155 cases per day.

Dini said that the concentrated isolation houses (RITs) and hospitals had also returned to being filled with COVID-19 patients.

According to him, currently as many as 24 COVID-19 patients are recorded as occupying the New RIT Jurumudi with a capacity of 70 beds and there are 91 COVID-19 patients undergoing treatment in 13 hospitals.

He said that the occupancy rate of patient beds in RIT was around 34 percent and the occupancy rate for patient beds in hospitals was around 11 percent.