This is quite something to say: "Don’t worry too much about COVID-19. If you have been vaccinated and follow the protocol, you’ll be fine."I have been to Raja Ampat about 8 times including staying in MER and 2 other resorts in Dampier strait & several liveaboard in Raja Ampat & crossing from Ambon to Raja Ampat.
If I were you and have never been to RA, I would go with liveaboard first to see what RA has to offer.
I have been to Lembeh twice and Ambon once for muck diving. There is some great muck diving and relatively unknown to most in RA, Algae Patch in Batanta that you could go by liveaboard, as shown in my video, below (also many other RA diving sites by going to my YouTube channel: Dan Tirto)
Magic Mountain in Misool also offer oceanic manta cleaning station.
Don’t worry too much about COVID-19. If you have been vaccinated and follow the protocol, you’ll be fine. I went to 8 liveaboards and a dive resort during the pandemic, got COVID-19 tested about 14 times and never contracted once (knock on wood)
When I sailed crossing from Ambon to RA, including Misool, I flew from Jakarta to Ambon and flew back to Jakarta from So-wrong.
At the moment 81 million of the Indonesian population of 277 million has been vaccinated with two shots. Mostly with Sinovac. Nobody knows in how far the people which have been vaccinated longer than 6 months ago still are protected against severe disease and death by Covid-19. Antigen and PCR tests can give both false positives and false negatives. No fun if you get a false positive test result at an airport here. Or if your dive buddy had a false negative. If this pandemic should have taught us one thing, it should have been that we cannot predict the developments more than 30 days ahead. The current situation in the Netherlands is a nice example. And as we know, regulations can change last moment in every country. There is not much reason to assume that Delta will be the last variant of concern. If there would be a new and maybe worse wave of Covid-19 in 2022 in Indonesia, visitors could find themselves in very unpredictable circumstances. I am longing to read one single logical reason why this cannot happen.