A year and a half into the COVID-19 pandemic, Indonesia is still struggling to improve its contact tracing capacity, even as an unprecedented wave of infections engulfs the country and claims tens of thousands of lives.

Efforts to expand tracing have fallen short as health workers face mounting struggles in the field and containment and testing measures remain lax.

A medical worker from a community health center (Puskesmas) in North Jakarta who asked to be identified by her initials FGA said the government had been inconsistent with its directives on contact tracing, often leaving health professionals to grapple with the problem on their own.

With many health centers overwhelmed by influxes of patients and shortages of staff, FGA said there were few options but to rely on contact tracing assistants hired on short-term contracts.

The number of tr...