Health Minister: Hospital Bed Occupancy Rate for Covid-19 Keeps Dropping

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin said the hospital bed occupancy rate (BOR) for Covid-19 patients has declined. Indonesia has thus far had 430,000 beds in hospitals throughout the archipelago.

Budi outlined that 92,000 beds were occupied by Covid-19 patients last week. Earlier this week, it dropped by around 10,000 to 82,000. “Alhamdulillah (Praise to God), it has dropped to 82,000. So we still record a decline, especially in the Jakarta area,” said Budi in a written statement on Monday, July 26.

The decline was also recorded in West Java. However, Budi said the increase in positive cases was still rising in some areas in Java and Bali. “I see that [the number of cases in] Yogyakarta is still increasing. Bali also logs a slight hike, and also regions outside Java,” he explained.

The BOR is one of the indicators used by the government in determining the public mobility restrictions or PPKM Level 4.

Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan, meanwhile, said the queue of Covid-19 patients to enter the Emergency Room (ER) had decreased. In fact, he said, now there was no longer a queue of patients in the lobby of the hospital.

“This means that the number of new patients coming to health facilities has decreased, not as much as that in the past few weeks,” Anies said of the hospital bed occupancy rate in a video uploaded to the Jakarta Provincial Government’s Youtube account on Monday, July 26.

Read: Bed Occupancy at Jakarta's COVID-19 Hospitals Falls to 73 Percent

FAJAR PEBRIANTO