There were no families calling for help, no ambulances lining up, no patients being turned away and left to die.

The salesmen are back.

`Thank God. This place used to be completely hopeless. Now it’s like paradise,` he said.

Brighter days seem to be finally coming to Manaus, a city of more than two million people in the Brazilian state of Amazonas.

`We have gone many weeks without recording anyone showing Covid-19 symptoms,` said Uideia Galvao, a doctor at the Covid-19 treatment ward at August 28 Hospital.

A resident of the Witoto ethnic group receives a Covid-19 vaccine in Manaus city, Brazil in January. Photo: Reuters.

Throughout the pandemic in Brazil, Manaus has been seen as providing a forecast of what is to come.

Brazil, the country with the second highest number of deaths from Covid-19 after the US, is now looking to Manaus.

As the number of hospitalizations and deaths in Manaus plummeted, many people in other parts of Brazil began to hope for the same soon.

On July 12, Brazil reported a record low number of infections since January, when it recorded just over 17,000 cases.

For the first time in more than a year, scientists, who once issued warnings about the Covid-19 tragedy in Brazil, began to hope for brighter days.

`Unpredictability is a feature of Covid-19. But at the moment, the nationwide Covid-19 backwave has begun in Manaus. It may be what you expect to see in other parts of the country.`

Many people in Manaus now feel as if they have just survived a shipwreck.

`It is the tattoo on my body. There is no way I can forget it,` Marcia Freitas, 44 years old, said.

When the health system was overwhelmed by the pandemic last year, Freitas’s grandmother, father-in-law and aunt all fell ill.

Freitas had to put her in the car and travel everywhere to find a hospital bed.

Freitas, a government employee, sees the situation in the city gradually getting better.

But this is not Freitas’s personal story.

Lima could not find a place to treat his relatives and could not find medical oxygen, despite searching every possible source in the city.

Lima’s family now only has her and her younger sister left.

At a cemetery on the outskirts of Manaus, Ulisses Xavier still wears protective gear and goes to work, even though these days, he hardly has to bury any Covid-19 victims.

Ulisses Xavier stands at the cemetery on the outskirts of Manaus.

The place where Xavier is standing used to be a football field for people who worked at the cemetery.

Xavier hopes those days never return.