According to a medical association, more than a dozen fully vaccinated doctors in Indonesia have died of COVID-19 because the Southeast Asian country is struggling with a string of severe cases among vaccinated medical staff and a highly infectious new strain of the virus.

In the past week, the number of infections in this country of 270 million people has surgedAs of Saturday, more than 2.05 million cases have been reported as hospital occupancy rates in Jakarta and other hardest-hit areas soared to more than 75%.

Since the pandemic began, nearly 1,000 Indonesian health workers have died of the virus. The country’s medical association confirmed on Friday that 401 doctors were victims, and 14 of them were fully vaccinated.

Mohammad Adib Khumaidi, head of COVID-19 mitigation at the association, told reporters: “We are still updating the data and confirming whether other cases have been vaccinated.”

The rise in severe cases of vaccinated medical staff raises questions about China’s obstetrics and vaccinationBy early next year, Indonesia is heavily dependent on it to vaccinate more than 180 million people.

This month, more than 300 vaccinated doctors and medical staff in Central Java Province were found to be infected with COVID-19, and about 12 of them were hospitalized.

The country is also struggling to deal with new strains of the virus, including the highly infectious Delta variant that was first discovered in India.

According to Detik news website quoting provincial government officials, the surge in cases in the capital Jakarta forced hospitals to set up emergency tents.

In Medan, the capital of North Sumatra, Dr. Inke Nadia D Lubis, a member of the COVID Task Force in the region, reported that as many as 1,800 children have contracted the virus in the past six months, and 14 of them have died.

Detik quoted Inke as saying that more than a third of the reported cases were elementary school students and a quarter were high school students.

On Friday, President Joko Widodo stated that the country is facing “extraordinary circumstances” and vowed to respond with “prompt and appropriate policies” while urging his countrymen to cooperate with the government’s response.

‘Close to collapse’

Eka Mulyana, spokesperson for the West Java Medical Association, said that clinical symptoms indicate that stress is the reason for the surge in West Java cases.

“In West Java, the bed occupancy rate has exceeded 90%. Some hospitals have even exceeded 100%,” he told reporters.

“At this rate, our health system is close to collapse.”

After the Delta variant was detected in local test samples, dozens of communities in Kudus County, Central Java Province were locked down, leading to a surge in virus cases.

The surge is partly blamed on the millions of people who crossed the Muslim-majority country from the region at the end of Ramadan last month, Despite the official ban on annual immigration.

The representative of Kudus of the Indonesian Medical Association, Ahmad Ipul Syaifuddin, said that the large-scale population movement is almost impossible to determine the starting point of the surge.

He said: “We don’t know how to trace and find the first spreader of the Delta case, because the sample test results came out three weeks after the mass exile.”

“My sample is one of the test samples for the Delta variant. I have now recovered and (have) tested negative, but I still have a cough.”

At the same time, the “Jakarta Post” reported that among the people who had recently contracted the coronavirus was an Indonesian official who did not want to be named, and he was heading to Italy to attend an international conference.

After arriving in the port city of Catania in Sicily, the official was quarantined for 10 days after testing positive, where officials from all over the world are holding a series of G20 ministerial meetings.