Sardjono Utomo, a senior Indonesian physician, late on Tuesday afternoon admitted himself to his local hospital in East Java.
In just over 24 hours, as his fellow doctors phoned hospital after hospital in search of a ventilator in Surabaya — Indonesia’s second-largest city and a few hours’ drive away — the doctor and his wife, Sri Martini, would both be dead.
The death of Sardjono and his wife from COVID-19 has raised alarm bells in the world’s fourth-most populated nation, where the pandemic has steadily gone from bad to worse and is putting a significant strain on the country’s poorly equipped healthcare system.
Photo: AFP
In the past 10 days, Indonesia has posted four daily record-high numbers, the highest was on Thursday with 8,369 new cases, while local news channels have run headlines of more regional hospitals reaching capacity.
“It seems like the current overcapacity situation is the worst it has been throughout the pandemic in Indonesia,” Indonesian Medical Association spokesman Halik Malik said.
Public health experts have said that Indonesia has struggled since March to get the pandemic under control, now with 563,680 cases and 17,479 confirmed deaths — plus another nearly 70,000 suspected cases — it has by far the highest caseload and death toll in Southeast Asia, and the data show that the situation is intensifying.
Photo: Arif Rahman / via Reuters
In Pamekasan, a modest district on Madura bordered by the Java Sea, where Sardjono worked for years as a hospital director, there is not even one ventilator.
However, when the 67-year-old radiologist arrived at Pamekasan’s Muhamad Noer Hospital, he desperately needed one.
“Everywhere was full — and everything is full here in Pamekasan,” said pulmonologist Syaiful Hidayat, who treated Sardjono. “Now it is peaking.”
Sardjono’s son-in-law, 41-year-old Arif Rahman, said the deaths of his in-laws highlighted how ill-equipped the nation’s hospitals were to handle the pandemic.
“Ventilators are important,” he said, “In Pamekasan, which is a referral for other regions, it is of course pitiful. Let alone in other places like Surabaya, where it is always full.”
Asked why Sardjono could not find a ventilator, Surabaya government spokesman Febriadhitya Prajatara said they had tried too late, and the city was not to blame.
In the capital, there is also cause for concern.
LaporCOVID-19, an independent coronavirus data initiative, this week said that Jakarta’s emergency wards were veering toward “collapse.”
In helping coronavirus patients find hospital beds from Nov. 27 to Nov. 29, LaporCOVID-19 contacted emergency wards at 69 hospitals and discovered that 97 percent were full.
Asked why a senior doctor was unable to receive the treatment he needed, Syaiful said there was just not enough room.
“Who do you want to kick out?” he asked. “You can’t do that. It shows that COVID is here and it is real… It can happen to anyone and we won’t have enough beds.”
NASA on Monday successfully flew its mini helicopter Ingenuity on Mars, the first powered flight on another planet and a feat the agency said was “our Wright brothers moment.” The 1.8kg rotorcraft lifted off at 7:34am GMT, rose to 3m, swiveled its tissue-box-sized body, swayed in a gentle Martian breeze and then touched down after 39.1 seconds. Data and images from the flight were transmitted 278 million kilometers to Earth, where they were received by NASA’s array of ground antennas and processed almost three-and-a-half hours later. Engineers in orange polo shirts were glued to their screens at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California,
Furthering the growing interest in unidentified flying objects (UFOs), or what the US government refers to as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), the US Department of Defense on Thursday confirmed that photos and videos of UFOs leaked in the past few months were legitimate and taken by US Navy personnel. Pentagon spokesperson Sue Gough confirmed to CNN that images and footage of a blinking triangular object in the sky, along with other aerial phenomena that were categorized as a “sphere,” “acorn” and “metallic blimp,” were taken by navy personnel in 2019. Gough told CNN that the department would not comment further on the
DRAWING DISMAY: Giving a forum to the coup leaders at the 10-country bloc’s talks in Jakarta this weekend would legitimize their rule, democracy advocates said Burmese Army Senior General Min Aung Hlaing is to join a special ASEAN summit on the weekend in his first official trip since masterminding a coup which deposed Burmese State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi, the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Saturday. The Feb. 1 coup triggered a massive uprising in Myanmar, bringing hundreds of thousands of protesters to the streets to demand a return to democracy, while civil servants have boycotted work in a bid to shutter the junta’s administration. The Burmese military junta has deployed lethal force to quell the anti-coup movement, killing more than 720 people and
AMID NEGOTIATIONS: Tehran for the first time confirmed that there was an explosion at its main nuclear facility on April 11, but denied that it was caused by a cyberattack Iran on Saturday named a suspect in the April 11 attack on its Natanz nuclear facility that damaged centrifuges, saying that he had fled the country “hours before” the sabotage happened. While the extent of the damage from the sabotage remains unclear, it comes as Iran tries to negotiate with world powers over allowing the US to re-enter its tattered nuclear deal and lift the economic sanctions it faces. Already, Iran has begun enriching uranium up to 60 percent purity in response — three times higher than ever before — although in small quantities. The sabotage and Iran’s response have further inflamed
RSS