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.”
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
RELATIONS: Cultural spats, such as China’s claims over the origins of kimchi, have soured public opinion in South Korea against Beijing over the past few years Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday met South Korean counterpart Lee Jae-myung, after taking center stage at an Asian summit in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s departure. The talks on the sidelines of the APEC gathering came the final day of Xi’s first trip to South Korea in more than a decade, and a day after his meeting with the Canadian prime minister that was a reset of the nations’ damaged ties. Trump had flown to South Korea for the summit, but promptly jetted home on Thursday after sealing a trade war pause with Xi, with the two
RSS