Rio’s Christ statue closes and state of emergency decreed.
News headlines today: Mar. 17, 2020RIO DE JANEIRO -- Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer statue, which appears to balance improbably atop Corcovado mountain, has withstood the worst of what the elements could muster for nearly nine decades. Now it, too, is succumbing to the outbreak of the new coronavirus.
Rio seems less marvelous by the day with the creep of the new virus. Firemen began blaring recordings that urge beachgoers to stay home on Monday, one day before Rio’s Gov. Wilson Witzel decreed a state of emergency. They did the same Tuesday, though it was hardly a beach day. The company that administers transport and installations at Rio's Sugarloaf Mountain, another postcard destination that sees 1.5 million visitors annually, already closed shop on Tuesday. Even before the governor's decree, Bondinho Pão de Açúcar had halved the number of passengers on its cable cars, to 32, and begun wiping them down with alcohol after each journey, according to Sandro Fernandes, the company’s CEO.
"What is incorrect is the hysteria, as though it were the end of the world. A nation like Brazil, for example, will only be free when a certain number of people are infected and create antibodies," he told a local radio station, Radio Tupi. “We have to count on the hope that we can find a family that wants to walk around and do something at least, so we can earn something this month,” Alexandre Faria Carbonelli said in the plaza beneath Sugarloaf's cable car. “For guys who work autonomously, don’t have savings, have a family, it’s kind of desperate.”
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