By Kim Iskyan
In the U.S., the COVID-19 virus continues its spread... particularly in California, Arizona, and Florida...
Why the sudden surge of interest for notary services? Death is in the air. And people in Dourados want to settle their paperwork just in case the coronavirus reaper knocks. With almost a million cases of the coronavirus, Brazil trails only the U.S. (at 2.2 million). According to University of Washington forecasts, Brazil could overtake the U.S. by late July in terms of both cases and deaths – even though it has just two- thirds the population. That looks increasingly likely, in part because the government doesn’t have a health minister. The previous two left within a month of each other after the country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, refused to listen to science. Last month, my friend Ernie left his home in São Paulo, the money (and now, coronavirus) capital of Brazil. He drove 600 miles west to join his wife at her family’s farmhouse near Dourados.
But my conversations with contacts around the world – particularly in Brazil and India – show that Americans are nowhere close to experiencing as bad as it could get. In Brazil, you know things are bad when the notary is busy... A notary certifies legal paperwork like contracts, deeds, and wills. Usually it’s a slow but steady line of work. Recently, though, for the notary in Dourados – a city with 200,000 people in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul, where my American friend Ernie McCrary is living in quarantine – business is brisk. People are in a rush to “put their affairs in order.” A local notary there says that she’s preparing double the number of wills a month compared with pre-COVID times. And she’s seen a 50% jump in requests to formalize so- called “stable unions” – that is, putting a ring on it for couples who live together but have never tied the knot.
American Consequences
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