The Rio de Janeiro Carnival is back after two years of suspension due to the pandemic

The Samba Schools of the Special Group, whose parades are considered the greatest outdoor spectacle in the world, returned this Friday to the Rio de Janeiro sambodrome after two years of silence due to the pandemic and just the day when Brazil declared the end of the COVID-19 health emergency.

With a parade in which she paid tribute to one of her historic “carnivalesques”, the award-winning Imperatriz Leopoldinense kicked off at 22.00 local time this Friday (1.00 GMT on Saturday) the two nights of presentations this year by the samba schools of the first division of Rio de Janeiro, whose parades are considered the biggest attraction of the most famous carnival in the world.

The start of the parades came exactly twelve hours after the Brazilian Minister of Health, Marcelo Queiroga, repealed the February 2020 decree by which the Government declared a state of health emergency due to the COVID pandemic and which was the basis for all the social distancing measures that were in place over the past two years, even those that banned carnival.

The resumption of the pompous and exuberant presentations of samba schools also coincided with the fall this Friday in the average number of deaths from COVID in Brazil to 93 per day, its lowest level in more than two years, since April 9, 2020 (92 victims daily), when the pandemic was just beginning.

It was precisely the drop in coronavirus infections and deaths to levels similar to those at the beginning of the pandemic that allowed the Government to declare the end of the emergency and the mayor's office of Rio de Janeiro to authorize the return of samba schools to the sambadrome.

The 12 schools of the Special Group, each with some 4,000 musicians and dancers luxuriously dressed and displaying grand and gigantic allegorical floats, will have a minimum of 65 minutes to cross the 700 meters of the sambadrome and show that Brazil's most emblematic city left the pandemic behind.

The sambadrome had its doors closed for the schools of the Special Group since February 25, 2020, when the last parade ended and at the beginning of a serious health crisis that made Brazil one of the most affected countries in the world by COVID, as it has accumulated 30.3 million infections and 662,557 victims to date.

The crisis forced Rio's mayor's office to cancel the 2021 carnival, something that had never happened before since this Brazilian city organized its first official carnival ball in 1840.

On two occasions the party was postponed (1892 and 1912) but the authorities were never able to cancel it, not even when the country faced the spanish flu pandemic (1919).

And the 2022 carnival was also canceled in January, when the Ómicron variant caused a third wave of the pandemic in Brazil with record numbers of infections, but the mayor's office took a step back and, with the expectation that the health emergency would be overcome, announced that samba schools would parade in April, with two months late than the usual date.

Despite the fact that the municipality only authorized parades at the sambadrome, where access can be limited only to people who present their vaccination certificate, since last Thursday about twenty blocos (troupes) have taken to the streets to make “clandestine” presentations to the blind eye of the authorities.

The blocos attract millions of people for their spontaneous performances on the streets, but the mayor's office refrained from suppressing this week's parades because the main and elders, who gather large crowds, pledged not to show up this year.

But if the comparsas did not cause crowds, the parades of the samba schools did, although with all the public and the dancers and musicians vaccinated against COVID, since the sambadrome, with capacity for 70,000 spectators, was practically full at the beginning of the performances.

It was that audience that saw Imperatriz Leopoldinense, champion in 2020 among the second division schools, open this year's parades with a tribute to Arlindo Rodrigues, the “carnival” responsible for two of this school's titles in the Special Group (1980 and 1981).

(With information from EFE)

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