Asuncion, Paraguay Paraguay is not a well-known country. Frankly, this is justified: it has nothing much to offer tourists that can’t also be found in one or both of its giant neighbours, Argentina and Brazil. Nevertheless, the Paraguayan people are polite and kind, the food is excellent, the climate is warm (of which more later), and right now it is a far pleasanter place to be than Britain. That latter statement is a fairly recent state of affairs. In March, Paraguay won some rare international praise for locking down hard as soon as it had registered its first two cases of COVID-19. This lockdown began to be loosened in May in the almost complete absence of both cases and deaths up until then, and was not reimposed when numbers did begin to pick up in July; although there was some typical fiddling around with local restrictions, curfews and other ineffective nonsense. As it stands according to the data, Paraguay has plateaued at about 15 deaths ‘with’ Covid per day since August (in a country of 7.3 million people). No classical epidemic curve, just a delayed rise to what may well be the endemic state. I have not come up with a fully plausible explanation for this pattern, but I am reminded of the observation that more equatorial countries tend not ...