Cleaning Officers At Wisma Athletes Have Never Been Abroad, UI Epidemiologist Calls Omicron From Local Transmission

Emergency Hospital (RSD) COVID-19 Wisma Atlet Kemayoran, Jakarta. (AMONG)

JAKARTA - University of Indonesia (UI) Epidemiologist Syahrizal Syarif said the first case of COVID-19 caused by infection with the Omicron variant was a local transmission whose source of transmission was within the country.

"This is not an imported case. This is a local transmission case because we don't know who transmitted it," he said when contacted in Jakarta, Antara, Friday, December 17.

The first Omicron case in the country occurred at the quarantine facility of the Wisma Atlet Jakarta Hospital, which was experienced by a hospital janitor with the initials N. The case was announced on Thursday afternoon by Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin.

The case was known based on the results of the sequencing genome analysis received by the Indonesian Ministry of Health on December 15, 2021.

Syahrizal said janitor N had never traveled abroad which caused him to suffer from COVID-19 from infection with the Omicron variant.

This means that the person can be infected with COVID-19 anywhere, at the Athlete's House, outside the home, or on the go. With that in mind, Syahrizal said that Omicron had spread in Indonesia because the first case was a local transmission.

If people come from abroad and carry a virus with the Omicron variant, then it is classified as an imported case.

A researcher at the Eijkman Research Center for Molecular Biology at the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) Amin Soebandrio added that the first case of Omicron in Indonesia was a case of local transmission because the sufferer did not go abroad.

It also means that the source of transmission is within the country. The source of transmission is also not necessarily at the Wisma Atlet, because the infected person in the first case of Omicron was traveling home.

He said there was a possibility that the person infected in the first case of Omicron was infected anywhere, such as on a trip, at home, elsewhere, or on public transportation.

For this reason, it is necessary to carry out contact tracing to find as many people as possible who have contact with that person and laboratory tests to determine whether there is transmission or not as an intervention step to prevent wider spread.

That person could be infected or contracted from someone who also contracted it from other people so it was possible not the first contact.