Indonesia - more than 350 vaccinated medical workers catch Covid-19 despite being vaccinated with Sinovac - June 18, 2021

[kiwibird]

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/18/asia/vaccinated-indonesian-doctors-covid-19-intl-hnk/index.html

More than 350 doctors and medical workers have caught Covid-19 in Indonesia despite being vaccinated with Sinovac, officials said, as concerns grow about the efficacy of some vaccines against more infectious variants.

Most of the workers were asymptomatic and self-isolating at home, said Badai Ismoyo, head of the health office in the district of Kudus in central Java, but dozens have been hospitalized with high fevers and falling oxygen-saturation levels.
Kudus, which has about 5,000 healthcare workers, is battling an outbreak believed to be driven by the more transmissible Delta variant, which has raised its bed occupancy rates above 90%.

 

[Shiloh]

Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/18/indonesia-covid

‘It will get very bad’: Experts warn on Indonesia COVID surge
Government is blaming the Delta variant for latest jump in cases, but experts say policy failures are to blame.
By Al Jazeera Staff
18 Jun 2021

Health officials in Indonesia are blaming the emergence of the Delta variant first detected in India for a massive surge in COVID-19 that has seen the number of daily new cases more than triple in recent weeks, but some of the country’s leading infectious disease experts say the real reasons are closer to home.

“The spread of this virus variant is very fast,” Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin admitted during an online seminar on Sunday, adding that the variant had got a foothold in Indonesia through its ports.

“Because many seaports in Indonesia carry goods and many also come from India, they enter from there,” he said.

But experts interviewed by Al Jazeera said the Delta variant was not the primary problem.

They say the surge is a result of travel at the end of the month of Ramadan – when many people ignored a travel ban to visit their hometowns, the absence of a cohesive health policy coupled with confused messaging, the privatisation of testing regimes and ineffective tracing.

While travel was restricted at domestic airports and ferry terminals from April 22 to May 24, the government estimated between five and six million people still moved between cities on Indonesia’s two most heavily populated islands of Java and Sumatra during the holiday period...