Anonymous 2m 524 #covid19
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
Corona Virus arrived in Brazil at the end of February but we just started our quarantine at the beginning of March.
Here it was a mess because each government adopted a way of quarantine. Big cities such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (I live in Rio) were the first, they began to close their stores, restaurants, malls, banks, gym centers, schools, everything that was not considered as essential service, only markets and drugstore keep opened.
People just were allowed to go to essential jobs, nurses, doctors, drugstores attendants, and market employees. Only they can use public transports or someone if any urgency but you have to explain and prove that to who is overseeing.
After São Paulo and Rio others, cities start their pandemic plan and in the middle of that, we had some political issues. Our president didn’t believe in COVID as a pandemic which he called little flu! He thinks like Donald Trump, so he denied the danger of the virus.
Due to this posture, governments followed OMS recommendations against the president, and a political struggle began. Meanwhile, people died and hospitals were closed to fail ( in a normal life our medical system is not so good, we have a public hospital and they didn’t work correctly and you have private hospitals, they are too expensive and the majority of the population doesn’t have access to it).
My routine changed a little bit, I was unemployed working as a freelancer but my husband started to work from home. Our moms are from risk group so we stopped to see them and we just get out to walk to the dog, go to market, and drugstore.
In my freelancer life, opportunities increased as entrepreneurs requested more social media, Copywrite, and virtual tasks but for those working on regular jobs, the scenario was terrible. A lot of people were dismissed or have their salary reduced by some percentage. The small business closed their doors and huge companies provided some help to them. Economy Minister and Government Banks released a little help for those people who work as self-employed, about USD 100 per month.
As time passed by political issues has come, the Health Minister was dismissed because he had some divergencies with the president who starts to believe and support treatment with Hydroxychloroquine. This medicine disappeared from drugstores and people who need it on a daily basis is having a hard time to find it.
There was only one state far from the main capitals that actually had a lockdown for a few weeks, the rest of the country did social distancing and heavy use of masks, that started to get requested to enter drug stores and markets, food stores and restaurants only work with delivery services, that sector experienced a boom during the quarantine. Today is the last day of May 2020 and some government measures to get back to the regular routine are already in the works for June. The comeback is being planned in waves and might be completed near the end of July for most estates, this is we don´t experience an increase in COVID-19 cases again.
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