Indonesia imports oxygen as hospitals battered by Covid-19
JAKARTA: Indonesia is sourcing emergency oxygen for virus patients from neighbouring Singapore, the government said on Tuesday, as the 24-hour toll soared to a record 728 deaths and hospitals crumble under the weight of its deadliest Covid-19 wave yet.
Jakarta warned that it was bracing for a spike driven by the highly infectious Delta variant that could send cases skyrocketing to more than 50,000 a day.
Hospitals in the hard-hit capital were topping 90 per cent occupancy while more than a dozen facilities in Indonesia’s second-biggest city Surabaya are now full and not taking any more patients, authorities said.
A Surabaya hospital spokeswoman described jammed ICUS and exhausted doctors, some infected with Covid-19.
“The hospital no longer has rooms for patients who need ventilators. The ICU rooms are also full’’, said the woman who asked not to be identified.
“We’re overwhelmed. Many of our health workers have collapsed from exhaustion and some are also infected. We trying to get volunteers to help out because many of the staff are down.”
Nearly 1,000 Indonesian medical workers have died of Covid-19, including more than a dozen who were already fully inoculated.
Desperate families are hunting for oxygen tanks to treat the sick and dying at home, as authorities scramble to enforce new virus curbs to bring down record daily cases, which soared on Tuesday to 31,189 new infections and 728 deaths — as much as seven times the daily mortality rate less than a month ago.
On Tuesday, Jakarta said about 10,000 concentrators — devices that generate oxygen — were to be shipped from nearby Singapore with some arriving by a Hercules cargo plane earlier.