The Indonesian Doctor’s Association (IDI) has recorded at least 100 doctors who have died on the frontlines of the fight against COVID-19 in the country, all of whom had reportedly tested positive for the coronavirus.
“Our doctor colleagues who died during the COVID-19 handling have reached 100. Likewise, [the number of] other health workers who died have also increased,” IDI chairman Daeng Faqih said today.
— PB IDI (@PBIDI) August 31, 2020
According to 2019 data from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS), there are 81,011 doctors throughout the country, most of whom are located on the island of Java. There are at least 11,365 doctors in Jakarta alone, followed by East Java province with 10,802 doctors.
Pandemic Talks, an independent COVID-19 information and data platform, said more than half of the doctors who died of COVID-19 in Indonesia were elderly, while around 40 percent were younger than 50. Based on their data analysis per Aug. 21, most of the doctors were general practitioners, followed by specialists.
“Only 12 percent of victims were specializing in handling COVID-19, such as internists, pulmonologists, anesthetists. It wasn’t only the elderly who were victims, [and] most of them were also general practitioners,” Pandemic Talks’ initiator Muhammad Kamil previously said.
Sutrisno, the chairman of IDI’s East Java chapter, identified two main factors causing high coronavirus infections among general practitioners during a webinar yesterday, namely fatigue and substandard personal protective equipment (PPE).
Indonesia continues to report worrying caseload spikes with a new record of more than 3,000 daily cases on Friday and Saturday. As of yesterday, the country has confirmed 172,053 COVID-19 cases, including 7,343 deaths.
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