The government will take advantage of the Covid-19 exhalation detector, GeNose, in all tourist attractions. GeNose is an innovation to detect Covid-19 through the first breath in Indonesia developed by a research team at the University of Gadjah Mada (UGM) and has obtained a distribution permit from the Ministry of Health on December 24, 2020.
Minister of Research and Technology Bambang Brodjonegoro said that later every visitor and employee in the tourism sector will be tested using GeNose before entering the area of ​​hotels, restaurants, tourist attractions, and others.
According to him, this method is expected to increase public confidence in returning to tourism after this sector has been hit by the pandemic. Foreign tourist visits to Indonesia decreased by 74.67 percent in 2020 compared to 2019, while the number of domestic tourists also decreased by 29.7 percent. This tool is claimed to have the sensitivity to read positive signs of Covid-19 up to 92 percent, then the specificity to read negative signs up to 94 percent.
GeNose is also claimed to be cheaper than screening using the antigen rapid test, and it takes less than 5 minutes to find out the results.
