The city hall of Sao Paulo, the largest metropolis in Latin America, announced on Thursday the cancellation of its street carnival due to the resumption of COVID-19 contaminations in Brazil, where Rio de Janeiro and Salvador de Bahia have also canceled these festivities.
“The Sao Paulo street carnival is canceled due to the epidemiological situation,” Mayor Ricardo Nunes said at a press conference.
As in Rio, which announced the cancellation of its street carnival on Tuesday, the Paulista authorities have nevertheless planned to maintain the emblematic parades of samba schools.
“We are going to meet with samba schools to establish a health protocol. If this protocol is respected, the parades will indeed take place at the Sambodrome, ”said the city councilor of Sao Paulo, a megalopolis of 12 million inhabitants.
These glitzy parades, with monumental floats, take place in an enclosure where it is easier to control the public and possibly require a health pass or a negative COVID test, like in a football stadium.
But many Brazilian cities are also known for their street carnival, with the “blocos”, processions of revelers gathered by the thousands to follow musical groups.
In some cities, “blocos” are already starting to parade several weeks before the official dates of the carnival, which takes place at the end of February.
Before Sao Paulo, other Brazilian cities had already canceled these processions.
On Monday, this was the case for Salvador de Bahia, where 16.5 million people had partied in the street, a record, during the last edition, in February 2020.
On Wednesday, it was the turn of Olinda, another city in northeastern Brazil, famous for its processions with “bonecos” – giants that look like those of the Dunkirk carnival – to cancel its street carnival, which had gathered 3.6 million people two years ago.
The number of COVID-19 cases has started to rise again in recent days in Brazil, with the end of the year celebrations and the arrival of the Omicron variant.
The latest report from the Ministry of Health, dating from Wednesday evening, reports 27,267 contaminations in 24 hours, unheard of since September 30 (27,757).