Indonesian volunteer biker Sebastian Dwiyantoro and his team have been particularly busy helping ambulances navigate heavy traffic in Jakarta’s satellite city of Depok to get COVID-19 patients to hospitals as infections soar in the country.
The volunteers ride motorbikes in front of the ambulances, the deafening noise of the sirens behind them, freeing up space and stopping other cars to make way for ambulances carrying the sick to medical facilities or corpses to graveyards.
Sebastian, 24, who has worked for volunteer group Indonesia Escorting Ambulance for four years in his spare time, says his team makes up to 20 trips per day versus three or four daily trips before the latest surge in cases.
Photo: Reuters
“Nowadays, we feel scared of [getting infected] with COVID-19 honestly, but I always think this is our call of duty from our heart to help and at the same time we also have to avoid getting infected with COVID-19,” said Sebastian, who normally works as a security guard, wearing a biker jacket and a mask.
Indonesia has been reporting more than 20,000 new cases and more than 400 deaths per day over the past week as the spread of the more contagious Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 accelerated infections and strained the country’s healthcare sector.
The volunteer bikers’ efforts are well appreciated by ambulance drivers.
“We feel very happy whenever these guys escort us because they can break up the traffic for us, because traffic in the Depok area is very jammed,” said 42-year old ambulance driver Endang Firtana.
“We don’t know how hard it would be if these guys didn’t help us and we might be late on sending corpses or helping dying patients,” the driver added.
Indonesia last week said it would put Java, its most populous island, and the resort island of Bali under stricter mobility restrictions from Saturday to July 20 to limit the spread of the coronavirus.
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
Three sisters from Ohio who inherited a dime kept in a bank vault for more than 40 years knew it had some value, but they had no idea just how much until just a few years ago. The extraordinarily rare coin, struck by the US Mint in San Francisco in 1975, could bring more than US$500,000, said Ian Russell, president of GreatCollections, which specializes in currency and is handling an online auction that ends next month. What makes the dime depicting former US president Franklin D. Roosevelt so valuable is a missing “S” mint mark for San Francisco, one of just two
RSS