Buenos Aires makes facemasks mandatory

The city government in Buenos Aires, the capital city of Argentina, ordered on Monday that the use of home-made masks on public streets will be mandatory as of April 15. Non-compliant citizens will be fined up to ARS 80,000 (USD 1,230).

On Friday, President Alberto Fernández announced the federal government had extended its lockdown until April 27. The measure is only to be enforced in major cities, such as Buenos Aires, Rosario, or Cordoba — which is where the majority of the Argentinian population lives. “We have managed to flatten the curve of new infections,” he said. Argentina has had 2,208 confirmed cases of coronavirus so far, of which 96 have been fatal, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at the Johns Hopkins University.

On April 1, Mr. Fernández showed concern for how Brazil is handling the pandemic, with his counterpart President Jair Bolsonaro becoming the global face of coronavirus denialism. “I am afraid that with this logic, [Brazil] will fall into the same [contagion] spiral as Spain, Italy, and the U.S., which declared quarantine when it was already too late,” said the Argentinian leader.

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