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WEST JAVA, Indonesia: When Ari Harifin Hendriyawan’s mother tested positive for the coronavirus, her neighbors brought a hammer and nails and bricked the road.
From his home in Indonesia’s lush West Java hills, the 23-year-old told Reuters the barricade appeared days after he received a negative test result and was home self-insulating.
“I was angry, of course,” he said. “If they (relatives) had not held me, I don’t know what could have happened.”
As the coronavirus spread through the world’s fourth most populous country, it also carried a stigma that public health experts say has prevented people from getting tested for fear of being rejected and complicated the response to the test. pandemic.
READ: Comment: Dear Indonesia, Shaming the infected is a lousy COVID-19 plan
For months, Indonesia has struggled to halt an increase in transmission, with nearly 229,000 cases and a death toll of 9,100, the second highest in Asia after India. It also has one of the lowest test rates in the world.
Indonesian COVID-19 task force spokesperson Wiku Adisasmito said the stigma faced by those infected remains an issue. He said the government was doing everything it could to counter that.
“Stigma can only be erased by tirelessly promoting health to increase awareness of infections and empathy to help those in need,” he said.
Indonesia has come under fire from public health experts for its relative lack of testing, its patchy social restrictions to contain the spread of the disease, and a list of unscientific treatments praised by cabinet ministers. At least two ministers had also contracted the virus.
From across Indonesia, more than a dozen healthcare workers told Reuters how the stigma around the coronavirus had complicated their work, or in some cases increased the risks.
In Borneo’s riverside town of Banjarmasin, public officials dressed in hazardous materials told Reuters how their arrival caused panic in the streets. Now they ask their contacts to visit the health center to avoid unwanted care, although that could increase the risk of contact and transmission.
From Medan, North Sumatra, nurses recounted how they were expelled from a village in March and told the virus was fake news, while others received abusive phone calls from parents, perplexed as to why their son, but no other, had contracted the disease. .
NIGHT CONVOYS
In remote West Papua, the fear runs so deep that nurses have repeatedly escorted patients to quarantine in the dead of night – convoys of prearranged motorcycles winding their way through jungle roads.
“The patients themselves requested it,” nurse Yunita Renyaana told Reuters via Zoom. “They said: ‘Sister, not tomorrow, come tonight so that nobody finds out … They were afraid of the stigma, of being seen as a disgrace or a source of contagion.
A survey conducted last month by Lapor COVID-19, an independent coronavirus data initiative, and researchers from the University of Indonesia found that 33 percent of 181 respondents reported being ostracized after contracting the coronavirus.
“This phenomenon of stigma is costing people’s health and also their mental health,” said Dicky Pelupessy, a psychologist involved in the survey. “There are cases where people just don’t want to be tested, they don’t want to be considered to have contracted the virus.”
On the islands of Java, Sulawesi and Bali, bereaved families have also stormed hospitals to claim the bodies of COVID-19 victims, fearing that their relatives will not receive a burial in accordance with religious beliefs.
Subsequently, dozens were infected.
“The government is not doing enough to really educate the people,” said Sulfikar Amir, a disaster sociologist at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, “That is one of the reasons we have seen extreme reactions.”
Among several Indonesian government initiatives is one with the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs and some 25,000 field workers to help share information about the coronavirus, including through Facebook, to help raise awareness and counter fake news. and stigma.
But months after the pandemic, many still feel isolated.
Ari’s mother was asymptomatic and in isolation for more than a month, she said, but she still feels rejected by neighbors.
Reflecting on the experience, Ari, now unemployed after the cafe he worked at closed due to the virus, said the response lacked empathy and logic.
“I think they are afraid,” Ari told Reuters, “Perhaps for them the coronavirus is as big as an elephant.”
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