The Copan building in São Paulo, Brazil, looks like a wave. It reminds me of the tilde that sits on the “a” in “São Paulo.” With 1,160 apartments, the massive concrete structure is the largest residential building in Latin America. It even has its own Zip code. Designed as a social experiment in the 1950s, the city-sized building now offers an up-close look at how a metropolis of 21 million is coping with isolation during the coronavirus pandemic.

São Paulo is the epicenter of the outbreak in Brazil. As of April 15, 28,320 Brazilians have been infected with COVID-19 and 1,736 have died. Of those who perished, nearly 800 were from São Paulo state. Like other countries, the lack