‘It will kill a lot of people’: Brazil’s overcrowded favelas brace for coronavirus | The Independent

• 

"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 nine-year-old boy was wearing a surgical mask, and his grandmother was scared. They were coming back from the hospital, trudging up a steep incline to their hovel in Rio de Janiero’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 coronavirus, had just been ordered into 14 days of isolation.

But Ms 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."

newstory by
Terrence McCoy ,
Heloisa Traiano 

‘It will kill a lot of people’: Brazil’s overcrowded favelas brace for coronavirus | The Independent: