Although her hospital provides its medical personnel with personal protective equipment, she is concerned it could soon run out of stock as it becomes overwhelmed with patients. With a disposable medical hazmat suit costing about 500,000 rupiah (US$30), and frontline workers using at least four hazmat suits a day to treat just a single suspected coronavirus patient, costs are also piling up.

“It would be like suicide if we had to deal with a patient without wearing any personal protective equipment,” Harjaningrum said, noting that some of her friends in smaller regional hospitals use raincoats or take turns wearing the same medical hazmat suit when treating patients who may have Covid-19.

Through Saturday, Indonesia had reported 1,155 confirmed coronavirus cases, with 102 deaths, the most of any country in Southeast Asia. Among the casualties were 10 doctors and a nurse, the Indonesian Medical Association said. Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan on Saturday said 61 medical staff in 26 hospitals in the capital had been infected with the coronavirus, according to a CNN Indonesia report.

But the data is seen as understating the real scale of infections, given the government’s slow response to containing the disease in the world’s fourth-most populous country.

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A study by the London-based Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases released on Monday estimates that as few as 2 per cent of Indonesia’s actual coronavirus infections have been reported to the authorities, meaning the true number of infections could be as many as 34,300, which would put Indonesia well ahead of Iran, the country with the sixth-most infections in the world, and just below Germany.

Other modellers are projecting that cases could rise to as many as 5 million in the capital, Jakarta, by the end of April under a worst-case scenario, although senior Indonesian health ministry official Achmad Yurianto dismissed comparisons to outbreaks in Italy and China, saying “we won’t be like that”.

“What’s important is that we rally the people … they have to keep their distance,” he said, adding that proper social distancing measures would negate the need for additional hospital beds or medical staff.

Meanwhile, Indonesia has just 12 hospital beds and four doctors per 10,000 people to battle the disease. By comparison, South Korea, which has reported 9,478 coronavirus cases and 144 deaths, has 115 beds per 10,000 people and six times as many doctors.

With hospital facilities at a premium, the government earlier this week began using the 2018 Asian Games athletes village in Jakarta as a makeshift hospital, with the capacity to treat up to 24,000 patients.

Welas Riyanto, a nurse who has worked at another referral hospital in Jakarta since 1993 and is responsible for handling potential coronavirus patients under observation, said one of the problems Indonesian hospitals faced was their lack of negative-pressure isolation rooms, which are used to contain airborne contaminants within the room, thus preventing the virus from spreading into other areas of a hospital.

Riyanto said that at his hospital, which he also declined to name, there was only one negative-pressure room to treat Covid-19 patients, on the first floor. On the second floor, the hospital has installed makeshift exhaust fans inside 10 wards in order to ensure that air inside the wards can be circulated outside.

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He said he had heard from frontline medical staff at his hospital and at other facilities that supplies of personal protective equipment were running short.

“The more that health workers are exposed, the more likely it is they will stop working,” said Riyanto, who is also the chairman of the Indonesian Emergency and Disaster Nurses Association.

STAFF SHORTAGES

Harif Fadhillah, chairman of the Indonesian National Nurses Association, agreed that the main issue for frontline medical staff in the coronavirus battle was the lack of protective equipment, with “almost all hospitals saying it is their No 1 problem”.

Earlier this month, the Health Ministry said it had ordered 10,000 pieces of protective equipment from India and Europe, but there was no evidence at hospitals that any of the equipment had arrived. The government also said on Friday it had distributed 151,000 pieces of protective equipment to various Indonesian provinces with the help of the country’s National Armed Forces.

Fadhillah said another concern for health workers was fatigue they faced from working overtime, given the general lack of trained staff in Indonesian hospitals. He said a single nurse could handle one to three critically ill Covid-19 patients, or up to eight healthier Covid-19 patients, during a single eight-hour shift.

With a shortage of nurses, though, some medical staff had had to work double and triple shifts to keep up with demand, he said.

The shortage had been alleviated somewhat through an online recruitment drive by the Indonesian National Nurses Association, which signed up 480 volunteers in a period of 24 hours, Fadhillah said.

But Indonesia also suffers shortages of other medical professionals.

Agus Dwi Susanto, chairman of the Indonesian Society of Respirology, told Indonesian news portal Tempo.co that there were just 1,106 lung specialists in Indonesia, when there should be around 2,600 specialists for the country’s 260-million population, or one doctor for every 100,000 citizens.

Harjaningrum, the Jakarta paediatrician, does not know whether the Indonesian government has done “too much or too little” in its handling of the pandemic. For now, she said, she was putting her faith in something other than government officials to resolve the problem.

“Surely God will take care of me, my family and my friends who have tried their best, are professional and want to give their best,” she said.

Additional reporting by Reuters