JAKARTA (INDONESIA) – Senior Indonesian doctor Sardjono Utomo admitted himself in a local hospital in East Java late on Tuesday afternoon. But over the next 24 hours as his colleagues desperately searched for a ventilator in Surabaya, which is the second-largest city in the country, the doctor and his wife, Sri Martini, died.
The death of the couple has raised alarm bells in the country, which has the fourth largest population in the world. Here the situation is going from bad to worse and it is straining the ill-equipped health care system.
Over the past 10 days, the nation has been witnessing record high infections. There were 8,369 new cases on December 3 and local hospitals are reaching full capacity.
“It seems like the current overcapacity situation is the worst it has been throughout the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia,” said Halik Malik, spokesman for the Indonesian Medical Association.
The country has been struggling since March to bring the pandemic under control and it has so far recorded 557,877 cases and 17,355 confirmed fatalities apart from nearly 70,000 suspected cases. It is the highest caseload and fatality toll in Southeast Asia.
There are no ventilators in Pamekasan, a district on Madura island bordering the Java Sea, where the doctor worked for years as a hospital director.
But when the 67-year-old radiologist got admitted at Pamekasan’s Mohammad Noer Hospital, he was in desperate need of one.
“Everywhere was full. And everything is full here in Pamekasan,” said Dr Syaiful Hidayat, a pulmonologist who treated Dr Sardjono. “Now it is peaking.”
The deceased doctor’s son-in-law Arif Rahman, 41, said the deaths of his in-laws show how ill-equipped the hospitals are to handle the crisis.
“Ventilators are important,” he said, “In Pamekasan, which is a referral [area] for other regions, it is of course pitiful. Let alone in other places like Surabaya, where it is always full.”
Febriadhitya Prajatara, Surabaya government spokesman, said they had tried but it was too late and the city could not be blamed for the lack of a ventilator, adding that the ICU capacity in the city was at 66%.
However, there are alarming signals from Java, which is the most populated island in Indonesia.
On Wednesday, West Java Governor Ridwan Kamil said occupancy rate for isolation rooms in Bogor, Depok, Bekasi and Bandung had reached 80%.
Things are taking a turn for the worse in Jakarta too.
LaporCOVID-19, an independent coronavirus data initiative, had issued a warning this week that the emergency wards in the capital were moving towards a complete “collapse”.