HOSPITALS IN INDONESIA FACE COLLAPSE AS THEY’RE FORCED TO REJECT COVID PATIENTS

Tue 26 January 2021:

Patients critically ill with Covid-19 are unable to find hospital beds as Indonesia crosses the one-million cases mark and medical staff struggle to keep up.

Health experts in Indonesia have warned that hospitals in some areas are on the brink of collapse as the nation passed one million confirmed cases of coronavirus.

In one case, a man died after he was turned away from 10 hospitals, including three in Jakarta, with doctors under greater strain that an any time in the pandemic.

According to The Guardian, in one instance a man died after being turned away from several hospitals, three of which are in Jakarta.

“It seems that the current overload or overcapacity situation is the worst during the Covid-19 pandemic in Indonesia,” Halik Malik, spokesperson for the Indonesian Doctors Association, told The Guardian.

He added that due to the increase in coronavirus cases, several regions’ patients had faced difficulties in accessing Covid-19 intensive care units and isolation rooms.

The health ministry announced that new daily infections rose by 13,094 on Tuesday to bring the country’s total to 1,012,350, the most in south-east Asia. The total number of deaths reached 28,468.

There is concern that recent regional elections, as well as the holiday period, have contributed to a rise in transmission.

If the number of cases does not begin to fall over the next week, hospitals in Java and Bali would collapse under the pressure, said Lia Gardenia Partakusuma, secretary general of the Indonesian Hospital Association (PERSI).

“Collapse means we will be in a condition where we can only treat the patients that are already in the hospital.

“This is not a fiction. Not a rumour. This has been happening in several hospitals,” she said.

“Collapse means we will be in a condition where we can only treat the patients that are already in the hospital,” she said, adding that currently hospitals have little choice but to ask patients to queue for hours in emergency rooms.

Limited testing and delays in obtaining results have hampered efforts to carry out contact tracing. According to Our World in Data, an Oxford University initiative that tracks data relating to the pandemic, the positive rate for tests was 27.70% over the past seven days. The World Health Organization (WHO) said in May that a positive rate of less than 5% was one indicator that the epidemic was under control.

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