Has your city your are living in seeing changes from this virus

Well other than heated arguments in the banks due to long lines (one at postal gasolina for not paying for gas) we have had a couple of protests by teachers that were going to be forced back to work. (That did not happen)
Now as to crime! This weekend $90 million (USD) of drugs and cigarettes were sized along the border from PY. (Also $100 million Euros of cocaine found in coal shipped to Italy from PY.
Many youths haved disregarded the no parties and we remain under a 23:00 to 5 AM curfew. There has been an increase in cases,
The good news is the vaccine has arrived and a free vaccine site will be held at Itaipu for everyone this Sunday. (I think I will sell hamburgers along the highway due to it being a drive-in and out the highway near my home will be backed up over 15KM)
Many have "cabin fever".

Texanbrazil wrote:

Well other than heated arguments in the banks due to long lines (one at postal gasolina for not paying for gas) we have had a couple of protests by teachers that were going to be forced back to work. (That did not happen)
Now as to crime! This weekend $90 million (USD) of drugs and cigarettes were sized along the border from PY. (Also $100 million Euros of cocaine found in coal shipped to Italy from PY.
Many youths haved disregarded the no parties and we remain under a 23:00 to 5 AM curfew. There has been an increase in cases,
The good news is the vaccine has arrived and a free vaccine site will be held at Itaipu for everyone this Sunday. (I think I will sell hamburgers along the highway due to it being a drive-in and out the highway near my home will be backed up over 15KM)
Many have "cabin fever".

Hey Texan! Do you have a link for the vaccine information at Itaipu? Sounds promising!

As the world is aware from the news, in Manaus our hospitals are full at 100% capacity.  Last week, our hospitals ran out of oxygen, an entirely foreseeable, and foreseen, disaster, and patients were asphyxiating in the ICUs.  The situation is gradually improving, but not as quickly as it should, for this city of over two million with no land connection to the rest of the country.  Please pray for us.

We have a curfew from 7 PM to 6 AM every day, indefinitely.  The authorities are finally cracking down on the "clandestinas", the big, illicit parties that have been serving as instant superspreader events since after the last peak in May.  Those actions are having some impact on the number of people in the streets, but it's too soon to see on effect on transmission.

English Penguin wrote:

Texanbrazil wrote:

Well other than heated arguments in the banks due to long lines (one at postal gasolina for not paying for gas) we have had a couple of protests by teachers that were going to be forced back to work. (That did not happen)
Now as to crime! This weekend $90 million (USD) of drugs and cigarettes were sized along the border from PY. (Also $100 million Euros of cocaine found in coal shipped to Italy from PY.
Many youths haved disregarded the no parties and we remain under a 23:00 to 5 AM curfew. There has been an increase in cases,
The good news is the vaccine has arrived and a free vaccine site will be held at Itaipu for everyone this Sunday. (I think I will sell hamburgers along the highway due to it being a drive-in and out the highway near my home will be backed up over 15KM)
Many have "cabin fever".

Hey Texan! Do you have a link for the vaccine information at Itaipu? Sounds promising!

Hard to copy from H2Foz
https://www.h2foz.com.br/ultimas-noticias/ Jan 17 notice. The total info is a link on FB, but I do not do FB

Texanbrazil wrote:

English Penguin wrote:

Texanbrazil wrote:

Well other than heated arguments in the banks due to long lines (one at postal gasolina for not paying for gas) we have had a couple of protests by teachers that were going to be forced back to work. (That did not happen)
Now as to crime! This weekend $90 million (USD) of drugs and cigarettes were sized along the border from PY. (Also $100 million Euros of cocaine found in coal shipped to Italy from PY.
Many youths haved disregarded the no parties and we remain under a 23:00 to 5 AM curfew. There has been an increase in cases,
The good news is the vaccine has arrived and a free vaccine site will be held at Itaipu for everyone this Sunday. (I think I will sell hamburgers along the highway due to it being a drive-in and out the highway near my home will be backed up over 15KM)
Many have "cabin fever".

Hey Texan! Do you have a link for the vaccine information at Itaipu? Sounds promising!

Hard to copy from H2Foz
https://www.h2foz.com.br/ultimas-noticias/ Jan 17 notice. The total info is a link on FB, but I do not do FB

Hmm, I was unable to find anything relating to it on that site. Me and my wife are sceptical about this, especially considering the amount of vaccines designated to Foz from that recent 5.1k delivery was around 3.2k. We are not expecting to see vaccinations for a while so any news we may have missed would be great to catch up on.

https://www.h2foz.com.br/coronavirus/ca … populacao/

I am sorry to here Manaus is having so much problem. I have relatives who live in a city close to there in Macapa. I just read in  the Rio Time Manaus has developed a different strain of the virus. This is supposed to be more easy to spread and younger people are now getting sick also if you had the virus you still can get this new strain. I was wondering what your thoughts are you said they weren’t following procedures. Could it be just like you said you are land locked closer in contact. I must say I’ve stayed out of public place just went to my first out door restaurant in 4 months. We  had family getting together with no one getting sick.

I had BH look at FB. It may just be a "motorcade" celebrating the arrival of the vaccine. Cannot really tell.

NewBrazil wrote:

I am sorry to here Manaus is having so much problem. I have relatives who live in a city close to there in Macapa. I just read in  the Rio Time Manaus has developed a different strain of the virus. This is supposed to be more easy to spread and younger people are now getting sick also if you had the virus you still can get this new strain. I was wondering what your thoughts are you said they weren’t following procedures. Could it be just like you said you are land locked closer in contact. I must say I’ve stayed out of public place just went to my first out door restaurant in 4 months. We  had family getting together with no one getting sick.

You were lucky.

We skipped my husband's family's big Christmas Eve supper, just had a quiet dinner at home for the two of us and his grandmother.  We felt bad about it at the time, but don't anymore:  four people who were at that party have gotten sick so far.  Fortunately, they haven't needed to be hospitalized, but I'm still glad we didn't go.

What's the story in Maranhão, anyway?  You're the last state where Folha shows infections as "decelerating" in its daily tracking.  Is the state really doing so much better than everyone else, or is it just not reporting its numbers?

I am in Imperatriz here it seem there is not such of a crisis. Was at a outdoor restaurant all the table were full. I haven’t been to our Malls so don’t know how crowded or how many stores have closed. The street the restaurant was on is like our restaurant row all were busy it was on a Friday night. My wife is younger so she does most the shopping at the grocery store. I haven’t  been in a grocery store for 4 months. The hospital doesn’t seem to be over crowded. Just saw a line at the Bank  today very few wearing mask and everyone next to each other. We had a very sunny winter and summer so not sure if that helped. People are still wearing mask when entering stores. But on the street no so much. I haven’t heard of a lock down here.

Paraíba looks like this:
Cases: 179,353
Recovered: 133,894
Deaths: 3926

Campina Grande (pop. 412k):
Cases: 16,489
Deaths: 491

The folks here generally are using masks but distancing is a hard thing given the culture of closeness is pretty embedded and "normal" therefore contrary to being a "good" person. Still, within my local family there has been huge respect to do everything to respect our desire for isolation, mostly due to the fact that the 84 year-old matriarch isn't in any condition to understand protecting herself from health dangers.

We do have the party problem. People (not just the young) in certain interior neighborhoods seem to be unaware of the details of the Covid situation and the die-hard gotta-do-my-annual-vacation-at-the-beach people, well they just pretend nothing is different from previous years and the parties are happening (all hours of the night) and nobody can stop them. They see Manaus on the news but it is as if a reality that they do not share.

Worst of all, we are still inundated by fake news and very little understanding of how one needs to verify any kind of information gleaned from the net from both friends and foes. This morning I was given a video of a pastor from Fortaleza that came out late last year claiming that the vaccines will cause not only cancer but contain HIV. Now for many it seems like a pretty ridiculous thing but I was asked (in my role as an "americano") what I thought of the pastor's statements - to which I quickly and easily pulled up stories from the Ministério Pública in Ceara taking the guy to task for his horrifying distortions (OK, lies). The story is old but it keeps resurfacing and lands in the hands of a lot of people that have very little exposure to any kind of education or any kind of culture where they might question what gets served to them. Sadly, this is not only a Brazilian thing. (For the curious just search on Pastor Daví Goés Ministério Pública Ceara)

Where I am seems somewhat stable, slowly spreading and with a portion of the population being conscientious but other parts of society not-so-much.

Vaccine: there's a lot of chatter about what's coming when. There are news campaigns showing trucks being sent out to distant communities to receive and distribute vaccine that will arrive by airplane. There's a bunch of "breaking news" about arrival of vaccine, about the qualities of one vaccine over another, about how priority is being set up. But in the end we're not seeing a whole lot of vaccine here and what is arriving is bringing out those worst attributes of people where the "privileged" do what it takes to get their dose (see Pombal prefeito fura fila OR "Amigos do rei" são acusados de furar fila). I'm not counting on seeing vaccine for my age group for some time yet and continue to do my best to stay healthy and remain isolated except as essential.

I feel fortunate that I don't have a crisis on my doorstep but also realize that it wouldn't take much for that to change. If only the federal gov't considered this whole situation more astutely. I keep hoping for changes in attitude in the USA as that generally catches the attention of people here. I hate to say it but mimicry can be a useful survival technique (make sure to look into the Brazilian contribution - Müllerian mimicry).

Apologies for being too wordy……. Matt

Yes, fake news is a serious problem.   The vaccine/hiv story was making the rounds here, too, but fortunately seems to have died down.

It would help a lot if the government would just take the pandemic seriously.   General (!) Pazuello, the Minister of Health, is a Manuara, he was here for three days the week before we ran out of oxygen,  and he was briefed on the impending crisis.  He didn't send any oxygen  - but he DID spend precious time pressuring the local Health Department to distribute hydroxychloroquine!

As oxygen dribbles in, and we keep hearing "someday soon" about vaccines, it's infuriating to remember that Pazuello's only selling point as Minister was that, even though he didn't know anything about Medicine or Public Health,  he was supposedly a "logistics expert"! 🤯