São Paulo, Brazil (CNN)In São Paulo, you can go to the market, hit a bar, attend Mass. All without wearing a mask, even though there have been more than 1.6 million cases of coronavirus in this country and deaths are continuing to rise.
The old town was busy Monday afternoon, on the first day of a new large-scale phase of reopening of Brazil’s largest city.
The streets were busy on São Paulo’s official reopening day.
Shoppers were out on the streets and in stores, sellers pushed carts of watermelon and other merchandise and all around were sounds of human activity — not back to pre-pandemic levels, but a hum that has been absent from so many of the world’s cities.
Inside a bank, people queued with space around them but in the smaller shops and on the crowded streets there was no way to maintain social distance. The sight of a shopkeeper aiming a thermometer at a customer’s forehead was rare and while many wore masks, an alarming number did not.
No wonder, given the pandemic politics of Brazil’s man in charge.
Sometimes known as the “Tropical Trump,” President Jair Bolsonaro has derided Covid-19 from the beginning of the outbreak as just a “little flu.” He undermined his Health Ministry’s call for social distancing with showy, unmasked outings and eventually fired respected health minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta.
“Mandetta’s vision was that of health, of life,” Bolsonaro explained. “Mine is more than life, it includes the economy, jobs.” As the death toll topped 5,000 he said: “So what? I mourn but what do you want me to do about it? … I am not a miracle worker.”
With at least 65,000 deaths and 1.6 million confirmed cases, Brazil is now second only to the US in terms of national suffering. But tests remain hard to come by and as they dig mass graves from Rio to Amazonia, some local experts say the real number of the infected could be 12 to 16 times higher.
