The Brazilian Ministry of Health announced yesterday Friday that 166,539 cases of SARS-CoV-2 have been confirmed in the past 24 hours and another 358 patients have died due to complications of COVID-19.
The giant country of some 213 million people has one of the heaviest death toll from the new coronavirus pandemic in the world: it counts 622,563 deaths at this stage out of a total of 23,751,782 infections.
Amid a new wave of infections, authorities in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo announced yesterday that the carnival parades, scheduled for late February, would be postponed until at least April.
The municipalities of the two largest and most populous cities in Brazil made this decision “because of the current situation with the pandemic (…) and the need to protect lives”.
The decision was announced after a digital meeting of mayors, state health ministers and representatives of samba schools in the two states.
As the onslaught of the most contagious Omicron variant continues, Brazil broke a 24-hour record this week with 204,854.
Carnival events, a lucrative source of revenue as they attract huge crowds and are a magnet for tourists, were already postponed earlier this month due to the epidemiological situation.
Until yesterday, almost 70% of the citizens had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
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