Bars and Restaurants to Reopen in São Paulo Starting Monday, Says Mayor

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The São Paulo City Hall and Bar and Restaurant Associations have agreed on sanitary safety protocols to allow the return of face-to-face service in the capital. Confirmation is expected this Friday, June 26th, of the city’s change to the yellow level, in accordance with São Paulo’s economic reopening plan. The reclassification is conducted by the state government.

“It is expected that with this reclassification, they (bars and restaurants) can restart their activities from Monday,” said Mayor Bruno Covas, in a video broadcast on social media on Wednesday, June 24th.

The plan to relax quarantine is split into five stages and there is a list of activities released for each of them. Each region is classified in a stage, according to the local pandemic severity. The capital is currently in the orange stage that allows for the reopening of shopping malls and stores, but bans bars, restaurants, and gyms.

Bars will have to respect a distance of at least 1.5 meters between tables and will only be able to operate for six hours a day, hosting only 40 percent of its seating capacity. Staff will need to have their temperature checked daily and offer sanitizer gel to customers.

The city of São Paulo has recorded a 6.97 percent reduction in the number of hospitalizations of suspected and confirmed Covid-19 cases (compared to the previous seven days, from 5,743 to 5,343) and its ICU occupancy rate stands at 57 percent. According to City Hall officials, these criteria enable the city to extend the relaxation of quarantine, allowing the positive migration from the orange to the yellow stage.

During the live broadcast from Itaú BBA via LinkedIn, on Wednesday, Covas said that Governor João Doria’s administration will announce the reclassification of municipalities on Friday, and further said that “we expect that now, with this reclassification, the city of São Paulo will enter stage 3, in the yellow stage”. According to the Mayor, this stage “allows restaurants here in the city of São Paulo to reopen for six hours a day. Of course, they never stopped working, most of them switched to delivery. We know how difficult it was for this sector to go through this period.”

The protocols with bars have not yet been signed so that the action is not construed as pressure from the City Hall on the Doria government, which has not yet confirmed the change in the municipality’s level. Therefore, some details concerning the resumption of these establishments are still open.

“The six-hour opening time may be split into shifts, with three hours for lunch and three hours for dinner,” said city councilor Rodrigo Goulart, a restaurant owner who has been mediating negotiations between the Brazilian Bar and Restaurant Association (ABRASEL) and the city government. On June 8th, Covas welcomed a committee of bar-owner associations.

Bar owners claim that, in addition to the authorization to host customers again, the city will free them to set up tables on sidewalks without charging for a use license (TPU), and will allow the fees paid for use during the pandemic months to be used to open up the sidewalks during the same period next year. The change would need to pass through the City Hall.

Barbershops and beauty salons should also be reopened

With the change of stage in the capital, barbershops and beauty salons will also be able to reopen their doors, again following security protocols previously negotiated with the City Hall: a 40 percent capacity limit and six hours of daily operation.

In addition, shopping malls and street trade will be able to increase their opening hours from four to six, and the public limit will be increased from 20 to 40 percent capacity.

Covas mentioned the expectation of increasing reopening when commenting on the results of the serological survey the city has been developing, which showed that over 1.16 million residents of the city have had contact with the disease.

“The latest serological survey showed that the lethality rate here in the city stands at 0.5 percent, below the rest of the world, which sometimes exceeds one percent in several European countries,” he said. “And now we are starting in the flexibilization stage, we are in stage 2, we hope soon to move on to stage 3 of flexibilization, with a large number of people currently immunized in the city of São Paulo,” he added.

Source: Estadão Conteúdo