The Cultural Institute (IC) of Macau has announced the cancellation of “New Year’s Eve 2020 activities”, including the usual fireworks program, due to the covid-19 pandemic.
“Thus, the programmed fireworks for the New Year, with the support of the Directorate of Tourism Services, will be canceled”, indicated the IC, in a statement released on Monday.
“A large flow of people”, as in previous years, “represents a collective risk” and “to give priority to public health security, New Year’s activities will not be carried out”, he stressed.
Usually, the New Year program includes “two shows in Macau and Taipa”, with “a large number of artists abroad and locally” and “more than 30 thousand participants”, he added.
Macau was one of the first territories to be affected by the pandemic in late January, having registered only 46 cases. Currently, there are no active cases.
The covid-19 pandemic caused at least 1,535,987 deaths resulting from more than 67 million cases of infection worldwide, according to a report made by the French agency AFP.
In Portugal, 5,041 people died from 325,071 confirmed cases of infection, according to the most recent bulletin from the Directorate-General for Health.
The disease is transmitted by a new coronavirus detected in late December 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China.
