Carnival returns to Rio de Janeiro after virus hiatus

Colorful floats and flamboyant dancers are delighting tens of thousands jammed into Rio de Janeiro’s Sambadrome, putting on a delayed Carnival celebration after the pandemic halted the dazzling displays.

Rio de Janeiro’s top samba schools began strutting their stuff late Friday, which was the first evening of the twonight spectacle.

Ketula Melo, 38, a muse in the Imperatriz Leopoldinense school dressed as the Iemanja deity of Afro-Brazilian religions, was thrilled to be back at the Sambadrome.

“These two years were horrible. Now we can be happy again,” Melo said as she was about to enter Friday night wearing a black and white costume made of shells that barely covered her body. Rio’s Sambadrome has been home to the parade since the 1980s, and is a symbol of Brazil’s Carnival festivities. During the pandemic, it was a shelter for more than 400 homeless people and also served as a vaccination station.

Brazil confirmed its first cases of the coronavirus in mid-March 2020, just after that year’s Carnival festivities came to an end. The 2021 edition was swiftly canceled due to the rise of the delta variant. More than 663,000 people have died from COVID-19 in Brazil, the second highest of any country in the world, according to Our World in Data, an online research site.

Entire communities rally around the competing samba schools, whose shows are not only a source of pride but also employment since preparations require countless seamstresses, welders, costume designers and more.

Sao Paulo also kicked off its Carnival parade Friday evening. Both cities’ parades usually take place in February or March, but their mayors in January jointly announced they were postponing Carnival by two months due to concerns about the proliferation of the omicron variant.

Members of the Imperatriz Leopoldinense samba school perform Friday night during Carnival festivities in Rio de Janeiro. The dazzling display was canceled in 2021 because of the outbreak.

measles, whooping cough and chickenpox vaccinations for the 2020-21 school year. That was down 1% from a year earlier and means 35,000 U.S. children entered kindergarten without evidence that they were vaccinated for extremely contagious diseases, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report.

In addition, almost 400,000 fewer children than expected entered kindergarten and their vaccination status is uncertain, the CDC said.

Pandemic-related disruptions likely contributed to the decline, the report said, as pediatricians canceled nonemergency appointments, parents skipped checkups for their children and vaccine requirements were eased for students doing remote learning.

“We haven’t seen outbreaks and that’s probably representative of the fact that families were staying home during the pandemic,” said Dr. Georgina