Health Protocol Compliance Monitoring Integrated System during COVID-19 Pandemic in Indonesia (Preprint)

BACKGROUND The COVID-19 cases are soaring in Asia. Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s most populous country is now on the second rank in Asia, just after devastating India. The compliance towards mask wearing, keeping a social distance and hand washing needs to be monitored to assess public behavioral changes that can reduce transmission. OBJECTIVE This study aims to evaluate this compliance in Indonesia between October 2020 and May 2021; and to demonstrate the use of Bersatu Lawan COVID (BLC) mobile application in in monitoring the compliance. METHODS Data was collected in real-time by the BLC app from reports submitted by personnel of the military services, policies, and behavioral change ambassadors. Then, the data was analyzed automatically by the system managed by Indonesia National Task Force for the Acceleration of COVID-19 Mitigation. RESULTS Between 1 October 2020 and 2 May 2021, the BLC app has generated more than 165 million reports, with 469 million people were monitored, and 124,315,568 locations were under observation in 514 districts/cities in 34 provinces in Indonesia. This paper groups them into four colored zones, based on the degree of compliance and analyses variations among regions and locations. CONCLUSIONS Compliance rates vary among the 34 provinces, and among districts and cities of those provinces. However, compliance to mask wearing seems slightly higher than social distancing. This suggest policy makers need to promote higher compliance in other measures, including social distancing and hand washing, whose efficacies have been proven to break the chain of transmission, when combined with masks wearing.