Reduced to sharing goggles and cheap raincoats, Indonesia’s under-equipped doctors are battling a tide of coronavirus infections that is overwhelming its creaky health-care system — and killing their colleagues.
Two dozen doctors have died since the pandemic began in the Southeast Asian nation, and critics warn that the official death toll of 459 is way below reality in a country with some of the lowest virus testing rates in the world.
Hospitals don’t have enough basic protective gear — never mind sophisticated ventilators — leaving many poorly paid doctors to battle the virus with little more than plastic rain ponchos.
Jakarta doctor Muhammad Farras Hadyan said supplies are running so low at his hospital that some colleagues rely on donations from family members to buy the few available certified hazardous material suits. “The rest rely on the hospital’s supply and they’ve got to wait,” he said. Handoko Gunawan, a 79-year-old pulmonary specialist, was on the front lines until he was forced into quarantine on suspicion he had contracted the virus. “I was shaking so bad, and the nurse was trembling,” Gunawan, who later tested negative for the illness, said of treating patients.