Indonesia’s Aceh medics offer COVID lifeline for the isolated

Aceh doctors hope monitoring through WhatsApp can help reduce the risk of people dying from coronavirus when quarantining at home.

Medan, Indonesia – It was the evening after the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha on July 20 when Hambal M Zain began to run a fever. The 61-year-old coffee shop owner, who lives in the city of Banda Aceh in the northwestern Aceh Province, thought little of it at the time and in the days that followed the fever subsided and Zain went back to work as usual. About a week later however, the fever suddenly returned and Zain developed a crushing headache. “I told him we had to go straight to the hospital,” his wife Azlinda told Al Jazeera. “But he didn’t want to. He was too scared of what would happen when he got there. I couldn’t sleep at all that night because I was so worried.”