The economic and social consequences of the COVID-19 crisis are becoming increasingly clear and frightening. All the self-imposed restrictions on business and social behavior, taken by governments across the world, may protect people’s health to a significant extent, but the policy measures also have devastating economic and social consequences as economic activity nosedives, and businesses collapse. This results in unprecedented mass layoffs as well as growing poverty.

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In mid-April 2020 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released its latest ‘World Economic Outlook’ report. It is in fact not a complete report. Considering the global economy has changed dramatically over the past months, the IMF’s previous update of the World Economic Outlook (released in January 2020) simply had no validity anymore, and therefore the IMF released one new chapter in mid-April 2020 (with the full report set to follow in May 2020).

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Better late than never! On 10 April 2020 large-scale social restrictions were imposed in the capital city of Jakarta through Jakarta Gubernatorial Regulation No. 33/2020, and Jakarta Gubernatorial Decree No. 380/2020. The regulation and decree, which both aim at curtailing the further spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) in Jakarta, were imposed around five weeks after the very first COVID-19 case was confirmed in Indonesia (namely in Depok, a city located within the Jakarta metropolitan area).

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The number of confirmed novel coronavirus (COVID-19) infections and fatalities have been growing steadily across Indonesia in recent weeks, especially in the capital city of Jakarta where around half of the country's total COVID-19 cases originate from. And the alarming matter is that this could very well be the beginning of the real storm.

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