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The planet began this Thursday to leave the year 2020 behind, marked by the coronavirus pandemic. Current conditions have forced billions of people to celebrate the New Year in the privacy of their homes.
The new waves of the epidemic force a majority to follow the festivities from the sofa at home, after months of restrictions due to Covid-19, which left nearly 1.8 million deaths worldwide.
From Sydney to Rome, humans will attend fireworks and shows via television or computer screen as long as the festivities have not been canceled.
The small archipelago of Kiribati and the Samoa islands in the Pacific have been, at 10:00 GMT (7:00 Colombia time), the first to arrive in 2021, while the uninhabited islands of Howland and Baker will have to wait 26 more hours.
New Zealand, applauded for its handling of the pandemic, welcomed the new year an hour later, with huge crowds gathering in Auckland for a fireworks display.
Although it is still isolated by the closure of the borders, New Zealand was able to celebrate the arrival of 2021 with relative normality, only some restrictions remain, thanks to the fact that it has not registered any case of local transmission for months.
In Sydney, Australia’s largest city, the famous New Year’s Eve fireworks lit up the harbor with a dazzling display at midnight, but few spectators.
Plans to allow large crowds were scrapped after a recent outbreak of pollution in the north of the city, which totals about 150 cases, has restricted travel to and from Sydney.
“I think everyone is looking to 2021 as a new beginning,” said Karen Roberts, among the lucky few who were allowed to pass through the checkpoints in the area.
In Tokyo, residents face the prospect of a state of emergency being imposed, after a daily record 1,300 new coronavirus infections were recorded.
Meetings forbidden
In Europe, Italy, where photographs of makeshift funeral homes and exhausted caregivers made the rest of the planet aware of the severity of the crisis, is subject to a lockdown of its population until January 7 and a curfew from 10 a.m. the night.
The Romans will attend from the sofa of their houses to the parties that will take place in the Circus Maximus, the oldest stadium in the city, where there will be two hours of shows and an illumination of the most emblematic sites of the city.
From Brazil to Latvia, via France, police officers and soldiers will be deployed, in some cases, to ensure compliance with the curfew and the ban on assemblies.
In London, severely affected by the pandemic, the 74-year-old American singer Patti Smith will give a live concert, in tribute to the caregivers of the NHS, the United Kingdom’s public health system, who died from Covid-19. It will be streamed live on Piccadilly Circus screen and broadcast on YouTube.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel took advantage of her New Year’s message on Thursday to remind that the “historic” coronavirus crisis will extend to 2021, despite vaccines.
“Hope is there, in the vaccine that human ingenuity managed to create in just one year,” French President Emmanuel Macron declared in his last speech in 2020.
Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged in his year-end speech that a second wave of the coronavirus is shaking Russia. “Unfortunately, we have not yet stopped the epidemic. The fight against the epidemic does not stop for a minute ”, he assured.
Social gatherings
In Dubai, thousands of people attended a fireworks and laser lighting show at Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest tower, despite a large number of new cases. Attendees must wear a mask and register with a QR code.
On the shores of Lake Baikal in Siberia, where temperatures drop to -35 degrees Celsius (-31 Fahrenheit), about a dozen Russians emerged invigorated after a dip in the ice on New Year’s Eve.
In Brazil, the second most affected country in the world, which has registered more than 193,000 deaths from covid-19, doctors fear a new wave.
In recent days, videos of people without masks have circulated on social networks and television has broadcast images of police officers closing bars full of customers.
“The peak of the pandemic was between May and July, which was when there was not much movement and we took better care of ourselves. Now there are many cases and people are acting as if there is no pandemic, ”said Luiz Gustavo de Almeida, a microbiologist at the University of Sao Paulo.
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