If you think that having to disinfect several items from your latest grocery shopping trip or food delivery is tedious, imagine having to disinfect several boxes of clothes, books and other personal belongings when you move.

Some people have no choice but to move during the pandemic, and believe it or not, the logistics affair that comes along with it is not nearly as difficult as you might imagine.

For instance, Siti (not her real name), a 38-year-old journalist living in West Jakarta, realized she could no longer stand her roommates at the co-living space where she lived.

“They were so jorok (dirty). They left food waste in the kitchen sink. They left strands of hair in the bathroom,” she said.

When the Indonesian government announced the first two coronavirus patients in the country on March 2, intensifying people’s concerns about health and hygiene standards, the unhygienic behaviors of Siti’s roommates became more than just an annoyance; they started to terrify her.

“They often sneezed and coughed and rarely, if ever, washed their hands. Late at night, they would frequently leave the co-living space to eat street food outside. Knowing that they almost never washed their hands, I was not able to sleep, full of fear that they had brought the virus into our apartment,” Siti said.

“I would toss and turn in my bed in fear until eventually I decided to leave my bedroom to spray the door handles and light switches with disinfectant soon after these people had gone to their rooms,” she continued.

As many people can attest, sleep deprivation is no fun, so Siti started looking around for a new place to live.

Similarly, sleep deprivation as a result of annoying housemates was the reason why Ilham, a 30-year-old civil servant, decided to move amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Since the housemates in my boarding house started working from home, they no longer needed to wake up early anymore, so they would stay up late into the night playing games and making a lot of noise,” he said.

So, Siti and Ilham started searching online for new accommodations to avoid going out too much during large-scale social restrictions (PSBB). Only when they found an ideal accommodation for them did they visit the place – while wearing face masks, of course. They were both lucky enough to find new places in the same area.

Siti was helped by her colleague who had a car to move her stuff to the new place. Ilham, meanwhile, used a service by GoBox, the logistical arm of the Indonesian superapp Gojek. They moved six boxes in total. Having to disinfect and clean each item as it left the old place to enter the new one added an extra hour to the two-hour moving process, which excluded time on the road.

Thanks to customers like Ilham, the local logistics industry, which according to the Indonesian Logistics Association experienced more than a 50 percent decline in overall business since the COVID-19 outbreak hit Indonesia in March 2020, could still operate.

The association’s chairman, Zaldy Ilham Masita, said the logistics volume had been down 60 to 70 percent across the board since early March because of emergency measures taken by the government to prevent coronavirus transmission, as quoted in a report by The Jakarta Post.

Gojek head of logistics Junaidi, meanwhile, said that GoBox had not seen any decline in its logistics services helping people move between accommodations, which accounts for 50 percent of GoBox’s total business with a huge concentration of demand in Jakarta and its satellite cities of Depok, Bogor and Bekasi in West Java, as well as Tangerang, Banten.

GoBox’s other types of services, according to Junaidi, came from distributing health gear and food to various healthcare workers during the pandemic.

In the light of the pandemic, these logistics operators and their customers have applied stricter health and hygiene standards.

“We require our driver partners to wear face masks, observe hygienic and healthy habits, keep at least a one meter of distance from other people and disinfect their vehicles and gear after use,” Junaidi said.

One GoBox partner, 55-year-old Sumantri from Tangerang, said that customers often got nervous as they had to move their belongings under such strict health and hygiene protocols.

“Some customers even started a joke out of their nervousness,” he said, recounting a client who, upon hearing him saying his name, said in a serious tone that she did not want to use his services because his name sounded like Sumanto, a notorious cannibal from Indonesia who was arrested by the police in 2003.

The client quickly said she was just teasing him and would be happy to go ahead with the moving process.

“In times like this, it’s always good to maintain a cheerful attitude. It will boost our immune system,” he said.

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