Foreword: Keeping Indonesia Safe from the COVID-19 Pandemic Lessons Learnt from the National Economic Recovery Programme

Summary

“If the past is cut off, the future does not exist” (Alexander Lowen). This book shows us that past experiences were the best teacher to face the unprecedented global COVID-19 pandemic. We are trying to record every single step we took to absorb any economic impacts of the pandemic for the lessons learned to the next generations.

BACKGROUND

The unprecedented COVID-19 virus became a global pandemic in 2020. Indonesia's first case of COVID-19 was found on 2 March 2020. The pandemic dramatically changed human life as all public places such as airports, seaports, train stations, bus stations, malls, shopping centres, roads, railways, restaurants, hotels, and movie theatres were suddenly closed. People work and pray from home, and students, teachers, and lecturers study from home. There were only essential activities that are exempted from mobility restrictions.

Changi Airport in Singapore, one of the busiest airports in the world, was suddenly empty. Jakarta, like other big cities in the world, suddenly changed from a high-density and traffic-jam metropolitan to an empty city with empty roads. The public crowd suddenly disappeared, and economic activities were just stopped and hibernated.

People have no memories of the global pandemic as the latest one was around one century ago, from 1918 to 1920, when the world faced a global pandemic of the H1N1 virus, well known as the Spanish flu, infecting around one-third of the world population. No prior reference can be used on how the COVID-19 pandemic will end. The only vivid figures that people can imagine about the end of the pandemic were taken from the movies that displayed the global pandemic, such as Outbreak (1995), Quarantine (2008), Black Death (2010), Contagion (2011), Flu (2013), and Infection (2019). At the very least, these movies gave optimism that the pandemic is bearable and can be cured.

The real game changer in the global COVID-19 pandemic is vaccine production that can be publicly available within one year. It is an extraordinary outcome as it usually takes more than five years to make the vaccine available for public use.

IMMEDIATE GOVERNMENT RESPONSE

The COVID-19 global pandemic that has changed human life dramatically made governments all around the world alter existing policies to combat the pandemic. Some governments decided on hard-core lockdown.