We have been in the middle of a pandemic for more than a year. Until now, the pandemic is still not over. However, when the pandemic status was first announced and now after more than a year, differences in conditions in Jakarta began to be felt. The streets that were once deserted, are now starting to get busy. People started activities outside the home with health protocols.

We have gone through a series of restrictions from the government to suppress the mobility of citizens so that Covid-19 does not spread quickly. At the beginning of the pandemic, the PSBB (Large Scale Social Restrictions) began to be enforced with very strict restrictions. Only certain sectors are allowed to continue operating, while other office sectors are enforced to work from home. Then, shopping centers and buildings for various activities were closed. As a result, the first phase of the PSBB showed a drastic reduction in mobility in Jakarta, indicating that Jakarta residents are obeying these regulations.

[The Impact of PSBB on Restricting Public Mobility]

After the implementation of the PSBB, the easing began to be slowly  implemented with transitional PSBB. During this transition period, the office is allowed to operate withonly 50% are allowed to go to the office and the other 50% continue to work from home. Shopping centers are starting to open with strict health protocols. In early 2021, the transitional PSBB was replaced with PPKM (Enforcement of Restrictions on Community Activities). If the PSBB is enforced upon the submission of the local government, PPKM rests entirely with the central government. However, the transitional PSBB and PPKM regulations tend to be the same. In the office sector, the transitional PSBB and PPKM both impose a capacity of 50%, places/restaurants are also allowed to open with a capacity of 50%. Even with the same concessions, are there any differences in mobility during the Transitional PSBB and PPKM in DKI Jakarta? By comparing the two restrictions with baseline or data benchmarks from when the PSBB was not implemented (on January 3-February 6, 2020), Jakarta Smart City conducted a monitoring on these two conditions using Google Mobility and Apple Mobility. Data compared to the baseline is the Transitional PSBB period (8 June - 8 July 2020) and  the PPKM period (9 March - 9 April 2021)

Activity at Home Decreased during the PPKM period 

With various #StayAtHome campaigns during the first restrictive period, many residents began to choose to stay at home rather than to leave their homes. In the transitional PSBB period, even though the easing has begun to be implemented, activity at home is still higher than before the pandemic.  

Unfortunately, activity at home began to decline during the PPKM period. From this graph, we can see an increase of 14.65% during the transitional PSBB period and it decreases to only 8.69% during the PPKM period. This shows that many residents started to have activities outside their homes during the PPKM period.  

Mobility at Public Places Increased during the PPKM period 

From this graph, it can be seen that mobility in stations and public transportation has decreased by -46.84% during the transition period of the PSBB. However, when PPKM took place, the decline became -34.44%. This shows an increase in mobility of around 12.4%. The increase was also seen in mobility in the park, which increased by 41.1%.

Apart from stations, public transportation and parks. There is also mobility increases at work, recreation areas, and in grocery and pharmaceutical stores, as the graph shows.
 

Mobility in the workplace has increased from the PSBB period to the PPKM period. However, the increase was not high. This can be due to office capacity that still imposes 50% of employees working in offices.

Then, compared to the period before the pandemic, during the transitional PSBB period there was a decrease of up to -33.74% in recreational areas. However, when the PPKM period was implemented, the decrease was only around -25.44%. This indicates mobility increase in recreation areas during PPKM  compared to PSBB. The increase was also seen in the grocery and pharmaceutical stores of around 6.83%.

Comparing Number of Pedestrians and Drivers 

From this graph, we can see that the average change in the volume of walking trips during the PSBB Transition was lower (around 10.83% of the baseline) than during the PPKM period (around 25.5% of the Baseline). This increase was also in line with the lower volume of driving trips during the PSBB Transition (around -1.38% from the baseline) than during the PPKM period (around 4% from the baseline). This shows that the level of walking and driving mobility during the Transitional PSBB (Blue Bar) is lower than PPKM (purple bar). 

Pulling Mobility Brakes in Jakarta 

The data visualization above shows that the Transitional PSBB was successful in reducing mobility outside the home compared to the pre-pandemic period. Although there has been some leeway in the social restriction regulations, DKI Jakarta residents are proven to be able to reduce their mobility rate. However, since the beginning of the year when the PPKM was implemented, the roads have started to look busier, and congestion has started to appear. This is evidently supported by the visualization that has been shown that during the PPKM period, compared to the Transitional PSBB, the mobility of Jakarta residents outside the home began to increase. If this continues, it is not impossible that mobility in DKI Jakarta will return to what it was before the pandemic, while the Covid-19 pandemic is still not over. Active cases in Jakarta as of 7 May 2021 show a total of 7,249 cases.

This data is an alarm for us to retract the mobility brakes and reduce movement outside the home as much as possible. If we succeeded in reducing mobility in the past year, then of course we can also reduce our mobility again this year and contain the spread of the unfinished Covid-19 cases.

In the spirit of taking care of each other and resolving the Covid-19 pandemic in Jakarta, let's all reduce our activities outside the home and tighten our health protocols again.