INTRODUCTION

On 30 December 2022, President Joko Widodo, popularly known as Jokowi, declared an end to Indonesia's restrictions on community activities (PPKM). The wearing of masks, which had not been required for small-group outdoor activities since May 2022, was still encouraged for group indoor activities or in large crowds. The government urged the public to continue with vaccinations and waived Covid-19 testing requirements for fully vaccinated domestic and foreign travellers. The lifting of the restrictions followed the decline in infections and the government's earlier mass serology test, which took place in November and December 2021 and was publicized in March 2022. The test showed that nine out of ten Indonesians already had Covid-19 antibodies, while the infection rate had declined through 2022 as people increasingly completed their vaccination regimes. Indonesia also averted new waves of infection in the wake of the Eid-ul Fitr holiday travels in May 2022. The President's message at end-2022 marked a watershed in the country's Covid-19 journey, which had begun with his 2 March 2020 acknowledgement that the pandemic had become a top priority.

This three-year path may have concluded with the health crisis under control, but we can trace a long and fluid journey to that point. Despite the pandemic's malignancy and the seemingly simple “recipe” to control it, the fight to curb it became a highly dynamic arena of interactions between government policymakers, health practitioners, businesses, civil society organizations, media and scientists. During the pandemic, these interactions often became highly politicized. Despite knowing that the virus was spreading and understanding some of the effects on health and the economy early on, the government downplayed the dangers and seemed to prioritize protecting the economy over saving lives, even if it officially and publicly claimed otherwise. The dilemma between economy and life was reflected in the early policies and approaches to fighting the pandemic, which was incoherent and ambiguous, with occasional denialist and anti-science tendencies. The approach was complicated by structural factors, especially ambiguities inherent in the country's decentralization. The eventual priority placed on the economy can be observed in the lack of vigour and coordination in the implementation of mobility restrictions, contact tracing, case finding and vaccination, as well as the distribution of social protection and strengthening of the health system. Inadequacies in government policy implementation and coordination arguably derived from “cognitive dissonance” (Nugroho and Syarief 2021), which was worsened by severely self-serving political interests.