13 August 2020

The situation with corona has been unusual for me. I was born in Brasil and moved to Finland to study, but my parents are still in São Paulo. Things have been going great here. Thanks to quick action from the government and the local culture which already implicitly dictated some form of social distancing even before the pandemic, contamination has been control. From my parents’ side, however, things have not been going so great. I read about Brasil’s situation every day on the news. It feels like a race to be declared the worst country at dealing with corona, along with the US and Russia. Our proto-fascist president Bolsonaro, much like other proto-fascists of this time, chose decided to completely ignore the science and allow hundreds of thousands (or even millions!) to die.
I am worried not for myself, but for my parents, both of which are old. I consider myself lucky that my parents do take the medical advice seriously and have been very careful with contamination, but such measures are useless if the rest of the community does nothing to prevent the spread of the disease.
Today, while in a call with my mother, we spoke of the vaccine Russia has recently come up with. We are very hopeful a vaccine will be completed before the end of this year so they can come visit me, but I am not sure I trust Russia’s word on the safety of the vaccine. Please do not confuse my worry with any anti-vax sentiment, I simply want to make sure the data validates Russia’s claims before taking it. The vaccine has not been released to the general public yet. Last I heard, they have not released enough data publicly to ascertain that, so I will wait further.
The worst part is that there is no happy ending to this pandemic, only less tragic endings.