(9 July): Southeast Asia, which escaped the worst of the coronavirus pandemic when it broke out last year, is again seeing record numbers of deaths and infections, with vaccination shortages and highly dangerous strains stalling containment efforts. As countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, and France prepare to lift the majority of remaining restrictions following devastating outbreaks, governments in Southeast Asia have tightened measures in the hopes that targeted lockdowns will act as circuit breakers, halting dramatic spikes, which began in May.
On Thursday, Indonesia, the region’s most populous and hardest-hit country, recorded 38,391 cases, six times the number a month earlier, in a week in which the country’s daily death toll more than doubled since the beginning of July.
Hospitals on Indonesia’s most populous island, Java, are overburdened, oxygen supplies are running low, and four of the five designated Covid-19 burial cemeteries in Jakarta are nearly full.
On Thursday, Malaysian officials reported a record number of deaths, while Thai authorities sought internal travel restrictions as the Delta variety that had been wreaking havoc in Indonesia quickly spread to and around Bangkok. A 5,000-bed field hospital is being built inside the Thai capital’s airport’s new terminal.
On Thursday, Myanmar saw more than 4,000 new cases for the first time, making it one of the worst days in the country’s history, while Cambodia has experienced the largest number of cases and deaths in the preceding nine days.
According to health experts, low levels of testing in the region’s most populous nations, Indonesia and the Philippines, are likely masking the real scale of outbreaks, while testing in Myanmar has plummeted since the military coup in February.
Panic-buying Vietnam’s status as a coronavirus success story is in jeopardy, with more instances reported in the last three days than in the first 13 months of the epidemic, despite the fact that the 1,314 cases reported on Thursday were a fraction of those reported in Indonesia.
Fears of a lockdown sparked panic shopping in supermarkets this week in the epicenter, Ho Chi Minh City, and a 4% drop in the country’s major stock index on Tuesday.
To protect itself from the outbreak in the southern business hub, where some of the country’s strictest restrictions went into effect on Friday, Hanoi’s capital banned public transportation from areas with infection concentrations.
The region was failing to cope with the Delta strain, according to Dicky Budiman, an epidemiologist at Griffith University, and was paying the price for inconsistencies in strategy and communications, as well as protocol compliance.
He also mentioned the need to expand the range of vaccinations available to better safeguard communities, pointing to the Sinovac vaccine’s dominance as a result of China’s vaccine diplomacy when western brands were unavailable.
“The vaccine has a lot of advantages, but it also has certain disadvantages. Why? Vaccines cannot stand alone in dealing with a pandemic on a larger scale “he stated “Vaccines must be diverse in order to be effective. Diversification of resources is required.”
Vaccination rates are still low, with only 5.4 percent of Indonesia’s 270 million people fully immunize, compared to 2.7 percent in the Philippines and 4.7 percent in Thailand.
Malaysia has vaccinated 9.3% of its 32 million people and implemented a tighter security perimeter around its capital and industrial belt.
Booster doses with mRNA vaccines, such as those from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech/Cominarty, are being considered in Indonesia and Thailand for medical professionals who have largely received Sinovac’s Chinese-made inactivated virus vaccinations, amid worries about their resistance to variations.
Singapore is one of the few bright spots, with officials planning to relax restrictions imposed when the Delta form was discovered and finish immunizing half of the population by the end of the month.
Residents who have been completely vaccinated will be allowed to attend larger gatherings like as concerts, conferences, and sporting events, according to the city-state./n
