Indonesia is battling a major Covid-19 outbreak, pushing its health system to the brink. WARNING: Graphic content.
WARNING: Graphic content.
Doctors are dying “almost every week” from Covid-19 in Indonesia, dubbed Asia’s worst outbreak.
Australia’s neighbor is in the grips of a Covid-19 crisis.
Indonesia has recorded more than 2.6 million cases and 68,219 deaths. And Indonesia’s per capita death toll has passed India’s, Nikkei Asia reports. Despite a strict lockdown for Java and Bali, daily cases have surged past 40,000 for two days straight. On Tuesday, 47,899 new cases were recorded. That’s the sixth daily record in the past ten days and seven times higher than a month ago.
The dramatic rise in cases is blamed on the highly transmissible Delta variant.
The positivity rate – the percentage of positive cases per person tested – is a massive 30 percent in some places, indicating poor testing and tracing measures.
There are more than 380,000 active cases, mainly in the highly populated island of Java.
Despite the city closing its borders for non-essential travel, cases in Jakarta have hit a record high since the lockdown began on July 3.
And Indonesia’s health system is under massive strain.
Nine provinces have reported hospital bed occupancy above 80 percent, including Jakarta and West Java.
Young medical graduates and trainee doctors are now being recruited, the ABC reports.
“Indonesia is so full of Covid now,” Debryna Dewi Lumanauw said.
The Jakarta-based doctor described the situation as dire. All of us are sick or were sick. All my friends are falling. Everybody who works along with us [is] collapsing. We must continue doing our jobs [but] when we work more than we can, we expose ourselves to more danger.
That also means we are exposing our family, the people that live in our house.
Oxygen has become a critical resource. Demand for medical oxygen has outstripped production capacity, health minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin said. Shortages were blamed for the deaths of 33 Covid-19 patients in early July.
Patients are also being turned away at major hospitals due to the Covid-19 crisis.
“We reject patients every day because there is nothing we can do if the hospital is full,” the head of the Covid-19 team at the Persahabatan National Lung Hospital, Dr. Erlina Burhan, said.
“Even if the patient is in a terrible condition and needs the ICU, if we have no space, we cannot take them, and we have to say, [we’re] sorry. However, President Joko Widodo praised his country’s handling of the pandemic this week. “It has caused health and economic crises. We are grateful that Indonesia is one of the countries that can control these crises well,” he said in a briefing. “The pandemic is still ongoing, and we must stay alert.”
