What's the coronavirus like where you are?

I don't go out much these days so I'm not a reliable source, but in Mexico City and the country in general Covid19 is now part of every day life.

There's a national stop light with four levels: red (complete lock down); orange (partial lock down); yellow (partial-partial lock down); and green (no restrictions). Every state can have a different level but it looks like the country will be on orange until a vaccine comes out while slowly lifting more restrictions.

Some of the restriction we have now:

• At the beginning, you were only able to use your car in certain days (depending on the car's plate number), this restriction was lifted on July 1.
• Super markets must check the temperature of every visitor and provide anti bacterial gel on the entrance, every visitor must also wear a face mask and be alone, this has been happening since the beginning.
• Non essential stores can only open every other day.
• Malls, restaurants, and bars are open since July 1, but they must operate at 30% capacity.
  • Malls must have the same procedure than supermarkets, but the group thing is not being enforced in some places.
  • Restaurant should have tables outside if possible.
  • Bars were only able to open for 5 hours I believe, now they can be open up until 3 in the morning.
• Movie theathers are open since August 1, same restrictions as mall and supermarkets, but they are allowed to sell food 🤦.
• Not a restriction but news coverage has diminished a lot, now it feels that tv stations only do weekly updates.

I went to a Burger King two weeks ago, even though it had a drive thru there were some people ordering inside, but most of these people where taking their orders to home, this was my case too. They took my temperature and gave anti bacterial gel at the entrance, I saw around 8 groups, mostly couples, everyone at a safe distance of each other and everyone wearing a face mask with the exception of a couple that were eating, they had masks they just weren't using them.

But scenes like that are not the case everywhere, Burger King is fancy restaurant without the fancy food, lower income areas are lest likely to follow the restriction, and there's a lot of them in Mexico obviously.

Poland

Everything is back to normal, with the exception of people having to wear masks to get inside of shops etc. (what most people respects, thankfully) and the fact that everyone who was in contact with an infected person has to undergo a quarantine. Also, some districts are marked as yellow or red zone (depending on the number of new infections) with more severe restrictions put in place, like requirement to have the mask on all the time. More information about restrictions are quite nicely described on this goverment web page.

Yesterday was the first day of school. A lot of people are worried that this will cause increase of cases.

A lot of people start assuming that the virus isn't that bad and we shouldn't be so scared, and that the current restrictions are enough.

Still, there are less than 1k daily new cases in the country. Let's hope it won't get worse than that.

Salvador, Brazil. Capital and largest city in the state. Population: 2.6 million.

Despite a steady (but relatively small) increase in new cases, malls and businesses are reopen. By law you cannot enter without a mask, and there are limits to how many people can be inside at the same time. But the food courts are also open, and no one eats with a mask on. So no one wears them there. I believe that’s a huge blind spot.

It seems that this won’t go away until 2022 anyway, so it makes sense to keep living our regular lives to some extent. There’s a weird sense of normalcy all of the sudden. Relationships blossom, work is being done. Including amenities. That’s unavoidable. The news media still frame each update as if we just entered World War III. But we’re desensitized, and why shouldn’t we? Covid is now just another fact of life.

For Honolulu, Hawaii, we started out dealing with COVID doing phenomenally well - as recently as July, we had only around a thousand cases total for a place of about 1.5 million people. Unfortunately, somehow or another it got in, and it took a few weeks before we realized we had an outbreak, so we're currently on a two week stay at home order. It's affected a lot of our local tourism industry pretty badly, and I worry about what it will mean for companies like Hawaiian Airlines that employ a lot of people in my field, but for me personally, it's been pretty great actually. Lots of university classes are online and asynchronous now, which has really eased scheduling and my social anxiety, and I hope these stick around as an option after the disease disappears. And if I were in the market to buy, there's a lot of really nice houses going up for much less than they were a year ago, I don't know if we'll see another opportunity like this again for a while. A riverside bungalow in Manoa (the most affluent district in Hawaii) for $800,000 is craaazy low for our standards, these houses used to go for over 2 million.

Argentina

I live in a small town and we only have 8 active Coronavirus cases in our 50,000 inhabitants area so it's very relaxed here and not really representative of many other areas of the country specifically of Buenos Aires (AMBA) which is where most of the population lives and where most of the cases are of course centered.

For a couple of months in my town we've been able to do pretty much anything with social distancing, face masks (mandatory, though sometimes not used) and a curfew from 1am-7am or so; social meetings in homes however have been banned for a couple of weeks since the cases started to go up nationwide. Bars here are open though and there's little to no social distancing inside, and no facemasks since everyone is eating or drinking.

Even though meeting inside homes is banned we still do it sometimes, I guess because we feel pretty safe from the virus and we think it's silly to be able to get together at a bar but not at home, we try to keep meetings small though, visiting relatives and hanging out with 3 or 4 friends.

Nationwide however it's much worse, we've been having around 9k/10k new daily cases this week, Buenos Aires and many other places have been in strict lockdown (only supermarkets, essential services, food delivery, etc.) for over 160 days and there's no sign of the cases stopping anytime soon, we're doing fine in deaths however, with about 200 new deaths per day and around 8k deaths total, which is much less than many other countries with similar number of cases.

Since we've had such a long permanent lockdown in many places of the country, there's unrest from parts of the population who cry for more liberties and softening the lockdown, some are more rational than others, the biggest issues are the rampant unemployment, business closing down, overall a big economy downfall, and psychological problems.

You can read about that in an article that The Telegraph wrote very recently.

Indonesia. The government has relaxed the lock downs and restrictions, but the daily new case numbers are still consistently going up (2700-3000+ new cases everyday).

I know that the economy must start rolling again at some point, but it still worries me. I'm just grateful that I can still work from home.

Covid-19 graph in Indonesia.

Canada, near Toronto.

I'm in a small city about an hour away from Toronto, and things are generally pretty under control. The number of daily cases has plateaued, and things are looking okay... this week. Next week is the start of school, and I think that things are going to go south pretty quickly (side note: "go south" has great layers of meaning in this context). I think that our school board, and indeed most of the school boards in Ontario, are doing herculean things to try to make school a safe experience for the kids, but to quote PIcard, "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness." I'm scared about the start of school. I think one of the biggest fears is having observed how the kids in our neighbourhood have behaved all summer long; other than my own children, who are as vigilant (obnoxious?) as me about social distancing rules, the kids just intermingle - they wrestle, they hug, they touch each other, they have no

Other than school, things are mostly reasonable around here. My city has had a mask rule in effect for months; I believe we were one of the first cities in the province to require masks everywhere. I haven't seen an in-person complaint in a long time, though our local discussion forums are rife with people calling it bullshit. Our city also shuts down most of the downtown core from Thursday through Sunday to allow the restaurants to make huge patios. It's pretty great, though I've only been downtown once.

The only store I go to with any frequency is CostCo. They do a really good job at disinfecting, and directing people to be distant in the lineups. Space requirements and aisle directions are well marked, there is an abundance of staff to clean, and people are mostly being as safe as possible.

The main activity that I have been doing lately is disc golf. I believe that the city where I am sends people out with some regularity to actually wash the baskets, because I've seen it happening twice. People are pretty polite about distancing. There's a lot of pot smells though. Parks are usually quite busy around here, especially with the very good weather we have had, but not so busy that anyone is within 10 meters of each other.

Overall, I think we're handling things about as well as is possible in Canada at this time. It's easy to get complacent and look south and think "We're doing better than that so we're doing well." I think we should be looking at other countries like New Zealand and saying, "We're not doing as well as that, so we should do better."

Boston, Mass (US) -
I'm honestly shocked and worried at how many people are out and about without masks, and I feel like we're headed towards another spike. oldgrimalkin on the boston subreddit has been posting daily updates on statistics, which has been a fantastic and simple way to keep track.

New Zealand here, we’re doing well we’ve had a second outbreak but we’re at the tail end of it now. Mask usage is mandated on public transport and suggested for everywhere else. Hopefully we’ll be back to zero cases shortly and I really do hope the two cases in the icu recover

India. In my city first case was reported in June.The numbers started to rise slowly, first it was 100, then 200, and now we are at almost 300 new cases daily. We have around two thousand active cases at present. Testing has improved drastically - India is doing more than million tests daily, highest in the world- but the large population is making it difficult. Masks are mandatory in all business premises and body temperatures are taken for everyone entering them. Areas with cases are turned into Quarantine zones restricting outside contact. Expect schools and cinema halls everything is open now. Rising cases are mostly because of people being careless due to lax in guidelines. A large number of people didn't realize low numbers are because of following strict guidelines. As soon as guidelines were relaxed our cases started to rise. Authorities are now doing door to door testing with Anti-gen kits and a Sero survey was done to check for antibodies. We have 12 free testing centers, private centers are charging as they like but maximum amount is Rs. 4500 set by the government.

Hopefully we get the situation under control again, soon.

Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

Restaurants have been open for awhile. I'll only go if there's actually room to get at least six feet away from other parties. We've turned around a couple of times now because there just wasn't enough space for us. Gyms reopened, but I've been working out at home for longer than COVID's been around, so I'm not sure what that scene is like.

Universities around here opened with in-person classes, then they sent everybody home a few weeks later when there were multiple outbreaks on/around campus. Felt like a classic "who could have known?!" joke.

People are wearing masks when they can't maintain social distancing, especially inside. We've gone to the beach a couple of times this year, and each time there has been plenty of room between our party of people and other folks. Overall, I think our governor (Roy Cooper) is handling things well.