São Paulo announces reopening of commerce, and researcher compares easing of restrictions to a 'slaughterhouse'.

247 - After car dealerships and offices, the capital of São Paulo is reopening real estate agencies and general commerce this Wednesday. Mayor Bruno Covas (PSDB) announced the reopening of street shops starting Wednesday, and all 57 shopping malls in the capital starting Thursday. 

The announcement comes at a time when the city has surpassed 80.000 coronavirus infections and is approaching 5.000 reported deaths from the disease—the city is still investigating another 4.588 suspected deaths caused by the pandemic. For medical professor Domingos Alves, head of the Health Intelligence Laboratory (LIS) at the USP Faculty of Medicine in Ribeirão Preto, the move towards relaxing quarantine measures has raised a red flag. "We are sending the population to the slaughterhouse," he stated. El País.

The reopening of commerce was already a planned step in the recovery since the end of last month, when Governor João Doria (PSDB) announced the São Paulo Plan for reopening the economy. In the government's plan, the state was subdivided into regions, whose reopening phases – five in total – would be followed at different times, depending on the evolution of the pandemic. At that time, a group of 66 researchers gathered on two research platforms, Covid-19 Brasil and Ação Covid-19, issued a technical note questioning the announced measures and the data on which they were based. 

The state and municipal governments, in turn, maintain that ICU bed occupancy rates are falling. This Tuesday, the ICU bed occupancy rate was 66% in the state and 67% in the capital—where authorities claim the healthcare system is no longer at risk of collapse as it was between April and May. Furthermore, public authorities believe the state is "approaching a plateau" in both the number of new cases and deaths, as stated on Monday by Carlos Carvalho, coordinator of the Coronavirus Contingency Center in São Paulo, during a press conference. 

But the numbers don't point to this possible stabilization, since the curve of new cases in the state is still rising. "Following the recommendations of the World Health Organization and the recommendations adopted worldwide, there's no way places with rising epidemiological parameters could relax any kind of measures," says Domingos Alves, who is part of the Covid-19 Brazil group.