Indonesia Imports Oxygen as Hospitals hit By COVID-19
Indonesia is importing for emergency oxygen for COVID-19 patients from neighbouring Singapore, as the 24-hour toll soared to 728 deaths record and hospitals crumble.
The government said on Tuesday that, Hospitals in the hard-hit capital were topping 90 percent occupancy while more than a dozen facilities in Indonesia’s second-biggest city Surabaya are now full and not taking any more patients.
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.
According to a staff in the hospital, she said, “The hospital no longer has rooms for patients who need ventilators. The ICU rooms are also full.
“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.
Indonesia is scrambling to innoculate over 180 million people by early next year. But so far, only about five percent of the total population has received two jabs.
Desperate families are hunting for oxygen tanks to treat the sick and dying at home.
About 10,000 concentrators devices that generate oxygen were to be shipped from nearby Singapore with some arriving by a Hercules cargo plane earlier.
The government was also in talks with other countries including China for help.
Jakarta has ordered all the nation’s oxygen supplies to be directed to hospitals overflowing with virus patients as the Delta variant ripples across Indonesia’s main Java island, home to more than half of the country’s nearly 270 million people.
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