Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: South-East Asia has emerged as the latest focus of the global pandemic and the world’s largest Muslim nation, Indonesia, in particular, has become the epicenter of a fresh wave of Covid-19, as the highly-contagious Delta variant of the SARS-Cov-2 virus has spread rapidly over the last few weeks.
On Thursday last week, Indonesia reported nearly 57,000 new cases, the highest daily total yet, and seven times as many as a month earlier. On Friday, it reported a record 1,205 deaths, taking the archipelago nation’s official death toll to more than 71,000, media reported on Monday.
But some health experts believe these figures vastly understated the actual spread in Indonesia, the world’s fourth-most-populous nation because testing has been limited. Dicky Budiman, an Indonesian public health researcher at Griffith University in Australia, estimated that the true number of cases is three to six times higher.
Only about 15 percent of Indonesia’s 270 million people have received a dose of a coronavirus vaccine, and just 6 percent are fully inoculated. Indonesia has relied heavily on the Chinese vaccine made by Sinovac Biotech, which proved less effective than other shots. At least 20 Indonesian doctors, who were fully vaccinated with Sinovac, have died from the virus.
Last week, the United States donated 4.5 million doses of the Moderna vaccine to Indonesia. Officials said the first priority would be to give booster shots to nearly 1.5 million health workers. Australia is also sending 2.5 million AstraZeneca doses.
Thousands of patients, lying in hallways, tents, and cars in different towns and cities, gasping for air, and waiting for beds in overcrowded hospitals have worried health experts the world over. Medical oxygen cylinders have vanished from many districts, and healthcare infrastructure has stretched to the limits at most places.
In this latest outbreak over the last few weeks, Indonesia has surpassed India and Brazil, having the world’s highest count of new infections. The surge is part of a fresh pandemic wave sweeping through Southeast Asia, where vaccination rates are low. Malaysia, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Thailand are also struggling with their largest outbreaks yet and imposed new restrictions, including lockdowns and stay-at-home orders.
Infection cases and deaths have suddenly gone up in the past month in densely-populated Java island and also in Bali. In the capital, Jakarta, a long line of patients usually waits for hours outside dispensaries, hoping to fill their portable tanks with oxygen. Some hospitals accepted only patients carrying their own oxygen.
In Bekasi, a city of 2.5 million next to Jakarta, 10 large tents were set up on the grounds, equipped with beds for 150 people, but the facility was overcrowded. The situation was grim in other places as well. For example, at the Dr. Sardjito General Hospital, in the city of Yogyakarta, 33 patients died this month after the central oxygen supply ran out.
With hospitals so overcrowded, many patients choose to stay home — and several died there. Lapor Covid, a non-profit group tracking deaths from the pandemic, said that at least 40 Covid-19 patients a day are now dying at home.
Although the government has not imposed a nationwide lockdown, it has clamped restrictions in Java and Bali, and closed places of worship, schools, shopping malls, and sports facilities, reducing public-transit capacity and limiting restaurants to takeaways.
Indonesian Health Minister, Budi Gunadi Sadikin, said last Friday that the country had increased testing to about 230,000 people a day, from about 30,000 in December 2020. His target is 400,000 a day. But experts said it was still woefully limited, and the share of tests that came up positive had risen to more than 30 percent.
