The suffering that ravaged India and Brazil has reached Southeast Asia. Indonesia, the fourth most populous nation, now has the world’s highest count of new infections, with 57,000 new cases reported on Friday.
The highly contagious Delta variant fuels the meteoric rise in infections on the islands of Java and Bali. But even the record case numbers are a vast undercount. Dicky Budiman, an Indonesian epidemiologist at Griffith University in Australia, estimates that the true number is three to six times higher.
Some hospitals are setting up emergency expansions, housing patients in large tents.