Coronavirus parties highlight Brazil's fractured approach to pandemic

For weeks, the booze-soaked, coronavirus-themed parties had raged over the road from Ticyana Azambuja’s home in Rio de Janeiro, until finally she snapped.

She picked up a hammer, marched across the street and used it to smash the rear windshield and Union Jack-patterned wing mirror of a reveller’s car.

“I just wanted them to come out and listen to me. I’d pay to fix the car, but they needed to understand how ridiculous it was to be throwing those parties day and night … right in the middle of a pandemic,” the 35-year-old said.

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Azambuja’s moment of fury was understandable, if illegal: an anaesthetist, she has spent the last three months battling to save lives on the frontline of Brazil’s fight against Covid-19 – even catching the disease herself.

On 30 May, the day she lost her cool, she had been trying to rest after a gruelling 24-hour shift at one of the three hospitals where she works.

The organizers of the bacchanalia showed no compassion.

“They came out to kill me,” Azambuja recalled of the vicious assault she suffered at the hands of several enraged partygoers, which was filmed by a neighbour. She was knocked unconscious and suffered fractures to her knee, neck and hands.

As neighbours rushed the doctor to hospital, the festivities went on.

“Every day I’m faced with life or death. I just cannot understand how these people can manage to have fun when so many people are dying,” Azambuja said as Brazil overtook Italy as the country with the third-highest Covid-19 death toll.

Her case was an extreme one but the party – where guests were reportedly given customized cups featuring the image of a pistol and the words “Baile do Covid-19” (“The Covid-19 Dance”) – was far from an aberration.

Even as Brazil’s coronavirus death toll has soared to more than 37,000, illicit shindigs have been reported from southern cities such as Curitiba to the Amazon in the north.

In Rio, where more than 6,000 people have died, the anti-crime hotline Disque Denúncia has received 700 calls reporting underground parties since the pandemic began – many of them bailes funk (funk dance parties) in the favelas. On Friday a luxury yacht with at least 20 people onboard could be seen moored off Rio’s chic south zone, music blaring.

“I’ve seen lots of parties like that,” said a resident of Urca, where the city’s Yacht Club is located.

The organizers of one recent rave called Pool Party Secrets asked guests to come in face masks. None did. According to an anonymous Instagram account which denounced the gathering, guests included lawyers, members of the military, two dentists, three nurses and even two doctors from one of Brazil’s biggest private hospital chains.

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In São Paulo, where more than 8,000 people have died, funk parties have continued in many favelas such as Água Vermelha in the city’s east. “The parties are still happening when I’m heading out to work,” said one local man, a gravedigger who buries Covid-19 victims while the revelry goes on.

In Porto Velho, capital of the Amazon state of Rondônia, police are investigating two recent blowouts where coronavirus carriers allegedly danced the night away. “They weren’t working … they were having fun – they were putting their lives at risk – and the lives of those of you who are following the governor’s quarantine order,” the state health secretary, Fernando Máximo, fumed in an online video.

“If you see anyone throwing parties … report them. Call the police,” Máximo said.

Even the president, Jair Bolsonaro, has broken health ministry regulations to have fun – attending a barbecue at a ranch in Brazil’s midwest on the morning of Azambuja’s attack where he was photographed hobnobbing with a crooner whose hits include a song called the Castle of Dreams.

Flávio Dino, a leftist governor and prominent Bolsonaro opponent, said it was unsurprising efforts to keep Brazilians indoors were gradually crumbling when the president set such an example.

“When a governor says A, and the president of the republic says B, and A and B are utterly contradictory then of course you can’t keep up the preventive efforts for very long,” said Dino, governor of the northern state of Maranhão.

Azambuja, who has a two-year-old son, said she was perplexed at how some seemed incapable of thinking about others and obeying social distancing rules during a health emergency some fear could claim 125,000 Brazilian lives by August.

“When I caught Covid-19, right at the start of the pandemic, my dad brought me some chicken soup and I told him to go away. I didn’t even want him at my door,” she remembered.

“Every day I see this disease kill people,” she added. “The doctors in some hospitals don’t even have sedatives and painkillers. They intubate patients with muscle relaxants, aware of it all. That’s why these parties are so surreal.”

Azambuja said she was determined to get back to work despite her injuries.

“My leg’s still bad,” she admitted. “But I don’t need my leg to intubate patients.”