Sumptuous parades and monumental floats attract hundreds of thousands of tourists to Rio in February (File)
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil:
Some of Rio’s largest samba schools say they will not participate in next year’s Carnival unless a coronavirus vaccine is widely available, Brazilian media reported on Tuesday.
Five of the top 12 samba schools, including Mangueira and Beija Flor, told the Brazilian newspaper O Globo that they would vote to postpone the parades at a meeting scheduled for Tuesday.
“It’s simple. If there is no vaccine, there will be no samba,” said Sao Clemente school principal Renatinho Gomes.
“How can you gather crowds without collective immunity?”
The mayor of the northwest city of Salvador de Bahia, where the festivities also attract thousands of tourists, has offered to postpone the carnival season nationwide until April or June.
However, samba school principals remain doubtful about setting a date without a vaccine.
“Without a vaccine, it is impossible to organize the carnival any day, whether in February or June,” said Fernando Fernandes, director of the school in Vila Isabel.
He said schools could also find themselves exposed to a court ruling that could cancel the festivities at the last minute.
“Once we have made large investments, the infection curve may rise again and the courts may intervene to suspend” the parades, he said.
The sumptuous parades and monumental floats attract tens of thousands of tourists to Rio for the carnival in February.
Each school marches with nearly 3,000 costumed members, dancing close to each other in the purpose-built Sambodrome.
But the proximity of the dancers and spectators in the tumult of the carnival poses a huge problem for the organizers.
“How are we going to do it? With a distance of two meters between the dancers? Is everyone singing with masks?” asked Fernandes.
“What weight would it weigh on the conscience of a school principal if he saw around 50 members of his school die after the parade?” said Elias Riche, president of Mangueira.
The Rio Ministry of Health has reported more than 132,000 infections and more than 11,400 deaths from COVID-19 by Tuesday.
However, the number of daily deaths has gradually decreased in the past few weeks, with 59 in the past 24 hours.
Shops and restaurants have gradually reopened, although schools remain closed.
Two vaccines under development are currently being tested on thousands of volunteers in Brazil, one of the countries most affected by the pandemic.
In total, Brazil has nearly 1.9 million cases and nearly 73,000 deaths.
The most optimistic forecasts concern the development and distribution of a vaccine by the start of 2021.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
