Indonesian hospitals ‘overwhelmed’ as the country crumbles under its deadliest COVID-19 outbreak yet
Indonesia has warned it is bracing for a punishing surge in COVID-19 cases as its daily toll soared to 728 deaths and hospitals crumbled under the weight of the country’s deadliest wave yet.
Emergency oxygen supplies for virus patients were being flown in from neighboring Singapore. At the same time, the government said Southeast Asia’s worst-hit nation could see cases soar to more than 50,000 a day. More than a dozen facilities in Indonesia’s second-biggest city Surabaya shut out new patients because they could no longer handle the enormous influx. Hospitals in the hard-hit capital Jakarta were topping 90 percent occupancy. A Surabaya hospital spokeswoman described jammed ICUs and exhausted doctors, some infected with COVID-19.
“The hospital no longer has rooms for patients who need ventilators. The ICU rooms are also full,” said the woman who asked not to be identified. “We’re overwhelmed. Many of our health workers have collapsed from exhaustion, and some are also infected. We are trying to get volunteers to help out.” According to the country’s medical association, nearly 1,000 Indonesian medical workers have died of COVID-19, including over a dozen who were fully inoculated.
Desperate families are hunting for oxygen tanks to treat the sick and dying at home.
Thousands of troops and police are scrambling to enforce new virus curbs to bring down daily record cases, which soared Tuesday to 31,189 new infections and 728 deaths — as much as seven times the daily mortality rate less than a month ago. Daily COVID-19 burials in Jakarta alone are up 10-fold since May, overwhelming exhausted cemetery workers scrambling to keep up.
‘Worst case’
On Tuesday, Jakarta said about 10,000 concentrators – devices that generate oxygen – were shipped from nearby Singapore, with some arriving by a Hercules cargo plane earlier.
It said the government was also in talks with other countries, including China, for help.
Jakarta has ordered all the nation’s oxygen supplies to be directed to hospitals overflowing with virus patients. The highly infectious Delta variant tears across Indonesia’s main Java island, home to over half of the country’s nearly 270 million people.
“The team is preparing for a scenario of up to 50,000 cases a day, maybe even 60,000 to 70,000 per day at worst,” said senior minister Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan, tasked with enforcing new virus rules.
But we hope that won’t happen.
Offices, mosques, parks, shopping malls, and restaurants have been shuttered across Java under new curbs that started from the weekend.
But there have been widespread violations.
Authorities in Java’s Semarang city fired water hoses at shops that have refused to close.
On Tuesday, Jakarta’s governor Anies Baswedan ordered dozens of offices to be sealed after some employers ignored work-from-home orders.
Indonesia’s substantial social media space has been jammed with fake news and hoaxes about the virus, while many have expressed doubts about taking vaccines. Surabaya’s mayor at the weekend ordered that vaccine-rule violators be forced to tour a local cemetery. In contrast, locals in Malang dressed as ghosts in the hopes of scaring rule-breakers in a country where supernatural beliefs are widespread.
