Indonesia Faces Devastating Covid-19 Crisis, With High Point Likely Yet To Come

(CNN) – The last time Aris Suharyanto saw his wife was through the hospital window. She was unable to meet her newborn baby.

When Suharyanto’s wife, Rina Ismawati, a pregnant woman, and two of their three children fell ill last month, he initially thought it was a common cold. But with the increase in covid-19 cases in Indonesia, he led them to get tested.

The entire family tested positive for COVID-19, including Suharyanto. Ismawati, 43, was admitted to the hospital, where she remained in bed, occasionally texting Suharyanto on WhatsApp. “He told me his condition was getting worse,” Suharyanto said. “I couldn’t breathe.”

Fearing for her baby, the doctors performed a cesarean section. But when Riski Aulia was born last month, she tested positive for covid-19 and was also struggling to breathe. His wife asked him to take her home, away from the intensive care unit where so many other patients had died, but her condition was too serious to transfer her.

On June 22, Riski died in the hospital. Suharyanto had only seen it in one photo. The next day, Ismawati also died.

Suharyanto’s wife and son are just two of the devastating and growing victims of COVID-19 in Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world, fast becoming the new center of the coronavirus crisis in Asia.

For weeks, Indonesia, home to some 270 million people, has recorded thousands of daily cases and hundreds of deaths as the highly contagious delta variant ravages the country.

Social networks are flooded with messages from users who lost loved ones to the virus. Hospitals are running dangerously short of supplies, bulldozers are frantically digging graveyard plots, and isolation remains impossible for the millions of people who, like Suharyanto, live from day to day. The country also faces the additional challenge of widespread and abundant misinformation, and a vaccination rate of less than 6%.

With more than 2.7 million people infected and more than 70,000 dead, specialists warn that the country may not have reached its peak due to the pandemic.

How did you get to this covid-19 crisis in Indonesia?

For much of the past year, Indonesia managed to keep its Covid-19 outbreak virtually under control. Then, when cases spiked in June, overwhelming hospitals, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies warned that Indonesia was “on the brink of a Covid-19 catastrophe.”

The country had seen a “dramatic increase in confirmed cases” after the holidays, Indonesian Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin said earlier this month. The minister attributed the explosion of cases to the rapidly spreading delta variant, which was first identified in India and has since spread to nearly 100 countries.

Indonesia entered a state of lockdown on July 10, at which point the country was reporting more than 30,000 new cases a day. The government said it is “mobilizing all resources” to deal with the COVID-19 surge, even bringing in oxygen from other countries to increase supply.

Covid-19 cases recorded daily

However, experts say that Indonesia is paying the price for not closing its doors early enough.

And the current numbers probably don’t reflect the whole picture. More than 27% of tests are positive, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University, giving Indonesia one of the highest positivity rates in the world. The figures suggest that many cases are not yet being detected.

A survey published last Saturday showed that almost half of the inhabitants of Jakarta could have contracted covid-19, more than 12 times the number of cases officially registered in the Indonesian capital at the time of the investigation.

“Without adequate tests, many provinces are unable to isolate confirmed cases in time,” said the World Health Organization (WHO) in its most recent status report.

Just a common cold?

Another major obstacle to controlling the Indonesian outbreak is the avalanche of misinformation.

For months, WhatsApp messages have spread fake news on the ineffectiveness of treatments against covid-19. In social networks they have circulated lies about vaccines, which has made some people unwilling to get vaccinated for fear it will cause serious illness or death. And due to misinformation, many people in Indonesia still do not take COVID-19 seriously, even as cases are increasing around it.

Amid all the noise, warnings about the severity of covid-19 are being lost.

A few weeks ago, Karunia Sekar Kinanti, 32, noticed that her two-month-old son Zhafran had a fever, but assumed it was a common cold.

Her mother had the flu and a cough, but Kinanti didn’t think it was covid because her mother still had a sense of smell. “His symptoms did not appear to be covid-19, so I was calm to respond to it,” she said. “So Zhafran, me and my other son also got sick.”

Children can get sick from covid-19

Two weeks ago, when Zhafran became weak and his breathing became more agitated, he took him to the hospital, where tests showed that Covid-19 had already damaged his right lung.

Remember that the doctor told you to prepare for the worst. “You can be optimistic, but it all depends on God,” he remembers him saying.

On July 5, Kinanti’s mother died. He still does not know if his mother had covid because they did not test him. Kinanti did not attend his funeral: he was in the hospital with his young son.

Aman B. Pulungan, president of the Indonesian Pediatric Society, noted that it is common for parents to assume that their child does not have COVID-19, in part because many people in Indonesia do not know that children may be infected.

Families do little to protect children from the virus, and even when infected, parents often think of it as the common cold. Schools were closed last year, and have been closed again under this latest lockdown, but Indonesian children are currently on summer vacation.

“We do not protect our children. That is the problem,” he said.

The more general problem is continued skepticism about COVID-19, according to a published article last month by Yatun Sastramidjaja, associate member of the Regional Social and Cultural Studies Program at the Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, and Amirul Adli Rosli, a researcher at the same institute.

“A more extreme type of comment has been circulating on social media, questioning the legitimacy of the government’s response to the pandemic and even dismissing any official information on covid-19,” they wrote.

Saturated resources

When Kinanti and her baby Zhafran arrived at the hospital, all the beds in the intensive care unit were full.

A reception official took pity on Zhafran and helped them get a room, and the next day they were transferred to an isolation room with other children infected with COVID-19. Zhafran was the youngest of them all, her mother said.

When Kinanti spoke to CNN earlier this month, he said there were nine children in the hospital room with them, and many more were waiting for beds.

The Indonesian crisis is unfolding in a similar way to the second wave of india, with a shortage of oxygen tanks and patients running from hospital to hospital trying to find help. Sudirman Said, secretary general of the Indonesian Red Cross, said patients traveled for hours to access vital medical care.

“Sick patients just wait for new deaths so they can even have a chance to enter a hospital,” said Project HOPE Indonesia Executive Director Edhie Rahmat it’s a statement earlier this month, adding that many hospitals have built tents to care for patients outside of buildings. “The peak of the second wave of covid-19 in Indonesia has not yet been reached.”

Covid-19 deaths of children and underlying diseases

The outbreak and the shortage of hospital beds make people with underlying illnesses even more vulnerable. According to Pulungan of the Indonesian Pediatric Society, many of the children who die from COVID-19 have underlying diseases.

That was the case with Tantien Hermawati’s baby, Baswara Catra Wijaya, who was born with heart disease.

She believes that the baby could be infected with COVID-19 when he was in the hospital in November of last year to undergo surgery for his condition. After she caught COVID-19, she could barely look at her baby’s face – she was clearly suffering.

He died on December 11, 2020, before he was four months old. Hermawati thinks she was lucky: at least she was able to attend his funeral.

She advises other parents to be more careful and cautious than her, and to stay home to avoid exposing children to COVID-19.

“It is very sad that our children are infected: our babies cannot tell us which part of their body is injured, and we do not know either. So please stay home and obey the sanitary protocol.”

The future

Indonesia’s main hope for dealing with the growing crisis is vaccines, Indonesian President Joko Widodo said on Wednesday.

“We must ensure fair and equitable access to vaccines, as we see that there is still a large gap in access to vaccines across the country,” he said, according to Antara News.

Earlier this month, the White House announced that it would send 3 million doses of the Moderna vaccine to support Indonesia against the surge. On Tuesday, more than 3 million doses of AstraZeneca’s covid-19 vaccine through the global COVAX program, the eighth shipment of its kind to arrive in the country. Indonesia has received more than 14 million vaccines through the program, according to state media.

But, for the millions of people already affected by COVID, those vaccines will arrive too late.

For Kinanti and her baby Zhafran, the situation improves. His doctor is more optimistic about his survival, but warns that Zhafran could always have a decreased lung capacity.

He says he underestimated the covid and thought it was impossible that it could affect his son: “I was late to the hospital, and I am very sorry.”

“Painfully real”

Suharyanto, a father of three children, lives with the guilt of not knowing if he introduced covid-19 into his home. He works as a motorcycle taxi driver in the city of Semarang, in the province of central Java; He always came and went, but his wife stayed home.

“The children are already normal. But I keep crying alone. I regret things, but I never imagined that this could happen,” he said. “I still can’t believe it’s gone so fast.”

Suharyanto wants people to understand that covid is not fake news or a conspiracy – for him, it is painfully real.

“People have never seen their family die from covid,” he said.