Indonesia church decorates Christmas tree with masks, sanitisers to promote COVID awareness

JAKARTA: A catholic church in Indonesia has decorated a Christmas tree with protective masks and hand sanitisers as a way to spread awareness of COVID-19 in the festive season, as the country's daily death toll hit a record high on Sunday.

"The tree was made with the intention of making people more aware of the importance of maintaining health protocols," Markus Marcelinus Hardo Iswanto of the parish of The Catholic Church of Christ the King in Indonesia's second-largest city Surabaya told Reuters.

Starting with a bamboo skeleton, the church's followers and the local Muslim community decorated the tree with hundreds of colourful donated masks and hand sanitisers, and took a week to complete the three-metre tree, he said.

Christmas is a public holiday in Indonesia, which has the world's largest Muslim population, but is only celebrated by around 10% of its 270 million people.

The government has urged the public to avoid celebrating Christmas and New Year in public places due to rising COVID-19 cases.

The country reported a record daily death toll of 221 on Sunday, bringing the total number of deaths in the Southeast Asian nation so far to 19,880, data from the national COVID-19 taskforce showed.

Indonesia has Southeast Asia's highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases at 664,930 as well as the region's highest related death toll.