Effect of long vacation on daily cases of COVID-19 during partial restriction in Jakarta, Indonesia

Abstract

Since the first case of COVID-19 was discovered in December 2020, the number of transmissions due to COVID-19 infection in the capital city of Jakarta has never decreased in the long term. The decrease in the number of daily positive cases through restrictions on social interaction implemented by the Government faced many obstacles during long holidays, hence it did not last long. In this research paper, we investigate the effect of long vocation on daily cases of COVID-19 by considering few factors including the level of surveillance through contact tracing and testing during social restrictions which are identified to be hampered by long holidays. Hence, based on the number of testing aspects in the time of the outbreak and serials of long holidays, a structural model was built to explain how these variables affect daily number of positive cases. The data for analysis taken at the first social restrictions period up to end of 2020 showed that daily positive cases consistently increasing. Time series structural model of the two-step approach shows that the time and number of testing variables significantly affect the number of daily positive cases, but long holidays did not directly affect the number of positive cases. In a sense, the effect of long holidays results in an increase in the quantity of the number of tests, which in turn will affect the number of daily positive cases. The forecast function for daily new cases obtained by the model performs relatively well in terms of the mean value of the squared prediction error, which gives a positivity rate around 7%.