Brazil: Carnival in Rio – splash instead of samba

In normal years, preparations for the early high point of the year would be underway. Because normally the Carnival in Rio would start next Friday. The epicenter would be the Sambadrome. In the stadium-like street with a grandstand, dancers and partiers would cause a stir. But the famous parades of the samba schools have been canceled due to the corona. Instead, the Sambadrome in the Brazilian metropolis under the Sugar Loaf has been transformed into a drive-thru vaccination center for the elderly.

Seniors who have missed their vaccination appointment can now be vaccinated against Corona there on Saturdays. You don’t even have to get out of the car, as the news portal “G1” reports.

“Civic Act”

“This is usually a place of pleasure. Today it is too, because we are doing a civic act here and opening the sambadrome to vaccinate,” said Paulo Roberto Machado of the AP news agency. The 68-year-old is a nurse and trainer at the University of Veiga de Almeida.

Machado has participated in the carnival parades here for the past 40 years, but on Saturday he coordinated the work of 20 volunteers for the first time. Nurses and medical students are now vaccinating here. “The vaccine represents the hope for better days, a return to normalcy, to what we used to do,” said Machado.

At the beginning it was the turn of the over 90-year-olds, by the end of March the city council of Rio de Janeiro hopes to have vaccinated all over 60-year-olds. The Olympic Park in the Barra da Tijuca district has also become a vaccination drive-thru.

Corona stronghold on Copacabana

Brazil is one of the countries hardest hit by the corona pandemic and has only recently started vaccinations. So far, almost 9.5 million people in the largest country in Latin America have been shown to have been infected with the coronavirus – only in the USA and India are the numbers even higher. In addition, more than 230,000 patients have died in connection with COVID-19 in Brazil.

According to “G1”, Rio de Janeiro, where 17,535 people died in the pandemic, overtook the metropolis of São Paulo on Thursday as the city with the most corona deaths in the country, São Paulo with more than twelve million almost twice as many inhabitants as Rio has.

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