COVID-19 deaths rise sharply in Indonesia

Indonesia recorded a sharp increase in daily Covid-19 deaths, reporting more than 2,000 for the first time on Tuesday, as the highly infectious Delta variant swamps the densely populated and largely unvaccinated country.

The death toll in Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation, has been increasing dramatically throughout July, with Covid-19 wards full and patients struggling to access ventilators and proper care.

Like the U.S. and other countries in Europe and Asia, Indonesia is facing a resurgence of the virus driven by the Delta variant, but unlike many developed countries it has sparse vaccine coverage. About 7% of the country’s population is fully vaccinated.

Scenes from the country resemble India during the worst of its spring surge in cases, as Indonesians line up for scarce oxygen supplies and whole families, including healthy young people, get seriously ill. By late July, Indonesia’s seven-day average of daily recorded deaths reached five deaths per million people, 67% higher than India’s during its peak in late May, according to Our World in Data, a project based at the University of Oxford. Epidemiologists believe that both countries have severely undercounted Covid-19 deaths, in part because many patients are dying at home without being tested for Covid-19.

Siti Nadia Tarmizi, a spokeswoman for the Indonesian Health Ministry, said the record death toll of 2,069 in part reflected that some areas had updated their fatality data, and uncounted deaths from previous days were included in Tuesday’s tally. But she said other areas in the country were seeing a rise in deaths.

Public-health experts said that the high death toll reflected the slow pace of Indonesia’s vaccine rollout. “Deaths are high in areas with low vaccination and high transmission,” said Pandu Riono, an epidemiologist at the University of Indonesia.

The government has promised to step up its vaccination campaign and focus scarce doses on the hardest-hit regions in the country—mainly on Java island, where most Indonesians live. On Tuesday, the country received an additional 21.2 million doses of the vaccine produced by Chinese company Sinovac Biotech Ltd., which it has largely relied on for its immunization drive so far.

In recent weeks, Indonesia has put restrictions on hard-hit areas around the country to stop the spread of the virus, including closing malls and places of worship and limiting the number of workers who can head to the office in many industries. On Sunday, government officials extended the curbs into early August in an effort to restrain the rising death toll, which they said was concentrated among the unvaccinated and those with underlying health conditions.

Even so, doctors in both heavily urban areas like the capital of Jakarta and more rural areas around the country say they are struggling to deal with the flood of new cases.

Dr. Bobi Prabowo, who leads the emergency room of a hospital in Tulungagung, a small city in East Java province, said in early July that Covid-19 deaths were twice as high as he had been used to seeing.

Since then, deaths at his hospital have only continued climbing. “There’s really no indication that cases are going down,” he said Tuesday. WSJ