Brazil Braces for Coronavirus

Since my son is currently stranded in Brazil (unless a military plane swoops in and flies him out of there), reading this scared the hell out of me.

[link:https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/brazils-densely-packed-favelas-brace-for-coronavirus-it-will-kill-a-lot-of-people/ar-BB11uQ4a?srcref=rss|

One of the deadliest and least predictable phases in the global coronavirus crisis could begin as innocuously as this: A grandmother and her grandchild walking up a hill.

The boy, 9, was wearing a surgical mask, and the grandmother was scared. They were coming back from the hospital, trudging up a steep incline to their hovel in Rio’s storied Santa Marta favela. Sonia Maria de Oliveira feared life was about to get more difficult. The boy, believed to be Santa Marta’s first suspected case of the novel coronavirus, had just been ordered into 14 days of isolation.

But Oliveira worried whether that was even possible. Families in this hillside slum crowd into small homes stacked precariously on top of one another, as in a game of Jenga. Children stream in and out of homes, past fetid canals and down alleyways that are as much community living rooms as passageways.

It’s a challenge now confronting governments across the developing world, as the coronavirus moves into densely populated, poorer countries, where expansive urban slums with limited sanitation and medical care could accelerate disease transmission.

In Liberia, the 2014 outbreak of Ebola was fueled by conditions in the slums of Monrovia. In India, influenza propagates more rapidly in the poorest neighborhoods, which then feed back into the city at large. And in Brazil, even the mosquito-borne disease of Zika was far more concentrated in the favelas of the north, around the city of Recife.

Now in the global war against the coronavirus, analysts believe some of the most important battles will be fought in the poorest parts of the developing world, with far fewer tools and far less capacity for isolation than higher-income countries.

“The strategy being pushed in the United States and China and Korea, there is no strategy for that there,” said Madhav Marathe, a division director of the University of Virginia’s Biocomplexity Institute. “Once a disease enters a slum, it’s very hard to do social distancing. Once it’s in a slum, it’s very hard to protect them.”

More at link.

Stay safe everyone!