“All of [the ventilators] will be given to the head of the National Disaster Mitigation Agency [BNPB], as the leader of our national COVID-19 task force,” Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi said.
ndonesia has received a total of 200 ventilators for hospitalized COVID-19 patients through separate partnerships with the United States and Australia, the Foreign Affairs Ministry announced on Thursday.
Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi said the country received 100 ventilators from the US on Wednesday, the first shipment of 1,000 promised ventilators.
“On July 21, support and partnership [supplies] from the Australian government in the form of 100 ventilators have arrived in Jakarta,” Retno said during a press briefing on Thursday.
“All of [the ventilators] will be given to the head of the National Disaster Mitigation Agency [BNPB], as the leader of our national COVID-19 task force,” she added.
The national COVID-19 task force previously said that, as of April, all of the country’s 34 provinces lacked the minimum amount of ventilators in hospitals.
In June, Indonesia received five ventilators jointly procured by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The five were the first shipment of an expected 33 ventilators.
The Research and Technology Ministry and the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) announced in early June that Indonesia would produce 100 to 300 ventilators with state-owned weapons manufacturer Pindad, hospital equipment maker PT Poly Jaya Medikal, electronics manufacturer PT LEN and automotive holding company Dharma Group, among other companies.
In partnership with the ministry, several universities have produced additional ventilators. The University of Indonesia, for example, gave the first five ventilators it produced to the national COVID-19 task force in late June and plans to produce 300 more to be donated to hospitals.
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