Restaurants, shopping malls and places of worship across Indonesia are set to resume trading nearly two months after emergency measures were put in place to halt the spread of the highly infectious Delta strain.
New daily cases have dropped below 10,000 per day for the first time since mid-June.
Deaths have also fallen below 1,000 a day for the first time in over a month.
Although testing rates have also fallen in recent weeks, positivity rates have also declined.
As a result, President Joko Widodo has confirmed that restaurants and places of worship will be able to operate at 25 percent capacity from this week and shopping malls can operate at 50 percent.
Restrictions will remain in place on the tourist island of Bali however but may be eased as early as next week. Bali has been hit hard by the Delta variant despite nearly 70 percent of the island’s inhabitants being fully vaccinated.
Across the country, only 11 percent of percent of the population has been fully vaccinated and while case numbers and deaths are falling dramatically in Jakarta, as well as on the hardest hit island of Java, authorities on islands such as Sumatera, Kalimantan and Sulawesi are now struggling to contain a rising number of infections.
Concerns also continue to mount around the possibility that Indonesia could yet become a breeding ground for a new and potentially deadlier strain than the highly infectious Delta variant.