The Rio carnival is considered to be the largest carnival in the world as the streets of Rio carry two million people per day. The recent rise in Covid-19 numbers has forced Brazil’s officials to suspend this year’s parade.
This year’s carnival was set to commence on February 25th and end on March 1st 2022. Each year prior to the official carnival, Rio hosts street parades, the parades begin weeks before the official carnival and unfortunately they have also been banned.
This year will be the second year in a row that the event has been cancelled. 2021 was the first year in over a century that the Rio celebrations had to be halted.
On a YouTube statement, Rio mayor Eduardo Paes said that, “The street carnival, by its very nature, due to the democratic aspect it has, makes it impossible to exercise any kind of inspection.”
Paes also announced that after a meeting with health authorities that the city would call off the street events that draw hundreds of thousands of Carnival revellers each year.
Other major cities in Brazil that host parades have had to call off all plans of hosting street parades and parties. Cities such as Olinda, São Luís and Florianópolis have also canceled their Carnival events in the last 24 hours.
However, the spectacular parade by Rio’s samba schools, which the public watches from the stands of the city’s Marques de Sapucai Sambadrome, will go ahead, unlike last year, with health precautions to prevent spreading the virus.
São Paulo, the capital of Brazil’s wealthiest state, is planning to transfer its street parade to the city’s Interlagos Formula One race track, the Folha de São Paulo newspaper.
The city’s tradition, with its lively music and elaborate costumes, has endured and often even thrived in difficult times. Brazilians have danced through wars, hyperinflation, repressive military rule, runaway street violence, and the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic.
Carnival is not only a big part of the country’s culture, it’s also an important event for the Brazilian economy. The carnival has a huge impact on the economy of Brazil. It is a multi-million dollar industry considering that at least a million foreign visitors flock into the country to witness the event, thus creating a ripple effect to the economy. The tickets at the Sambodromo always sell in high volumes months prior to the carnival.
Currently in Brazil 62 percent of its 213 million people are now fully vaccinated. The suspension of the Rio carnival comes at a time when a new dynamic has been observed in Brazil, citizens have reported coming down with back-to-back infections of influenza and Covid, or even at the same time which has been dubbed as “flurona”. Brazil’s hospital system may be at risk as a surge of influenza courses through the country just as the Omicron strain takes hold.
