São Paulo city Mayor Bruno Covas announced on Friday a plan to reopen bars, restaurants, barbershops and hair salons in the city on July 6.
City hall will still impose social distancing restrictions and limits on capacity, as São Paulo prepares to enter the so-called “yellow phase” of its reopening program, which involves more flexible guidelines.
The announcement came after the state’s governor, João Doria, approved the resumption of in-person services in Brazil’s largest city. The recommendation from São Paulo’s Contingency Center is to wait at least a week for the city to consolidate its yellow phase “status” through a sustained decrease in both new confirmed cases and death tallies.
Recent figures indicate that Greater São Paulo is slowly lowering the number of critical Covid-19 cases, with hospitalizations falling by 6 percent in comparison to the previous week, according to São Paulo’s State Health Secretary. Yet, São Paulo still registered its second-highest tally of daily confirmed cases on Thursday (9,765), pointing towards a still ascending infection curve.
Moving to the countryside
As previously reported by The Brazilian Report, the state of São Paulo — Brazil’s worst-hit state in total Covid-19 figures — registered new records for confirmed cases and deaths over a 24-hour period earlier this week. The spread, however, seems to be slowly shifting from highly-urbanized areas towards smaller inland cities — a trend being followed nationwide.
As São Paulo slowly moves towards full reopening, Governor Doria extended stricter isolation guidelines — wherein only essential services are allowed — to five new regions in the state, indicating the governor’s growing concern with the accelerating spread rate of the virus in the state’s interior.
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