ABSTRACT
The first cases of COVID-19 in Brazil occurred in São Paulo, the largest city in the country. It did not take such a long time for the disease to spread out from the city's affluent neighbourhoods to low-income and densely populated communities, as in the case of Paraisópolis. One of the largest favelas in Brazil, with more than 100,000 residents, Paraisópolis designed an alternative plan of action to fight the COVID-19 pandemic within its community, carried out by the Paraisópolis Union of Residents and Business (PURB) e o G10 Favelas. The community management of health-focused strategies involved hiring medical service to work exclusively in the community, setting up isolation houses to treat infected people, distributing food every day to families who had lost their jobs during the pandemic. It also puts into action a system of volunteers called “Street Presidents” who were in charge of monitoring families and individuals' routine of displacement inside the favela. This community initiative contributed to decreasing the mortality rate in Paraisópolis, in addition to highlighting the superior efficiency of the favela's alternative plan in managing the pandemic crisis compared to public health policies carried out by local government. Although many studies address the precariousness of public services in Brazilian favelas, this study focuses especially on the alternative community plan developed in Paraisópolis to successfully minimize the spread of the coronavirus through the reorganization of pre-existing regimes of (im)mobility, and social and economic practices in the favela.
