“If everything works out, we have already planned the first test event. “Let’s get vaccinated,” Paes wrote on Twitter.
The open carnival lover mayor plans to host a party in September on this island located in Guanabara Bay, an hour’s boat ride from downtown Rio de Janeiro, where the region’s first major carnival event will take place at the height of the covid-19 pandemic.
Only the local population of the island, which is home to some 4,200 people, is expected to attend the event, although the city did not specify how it would control visitor entry.
The carnival was put on hold this year across the country due to the strong spread of the pandemic in Brazil, one of the hardest hit countries in Latin America, which already has 17.4 million cases and more than 487,000 deaths.
Parque Island is part of a large vaccination study conducted by the City of Rio de Janeiro in cooperation with the Osvaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), one of the main research centers in Latin America responsible for local production of the AztraZeneca vaccine.
Next Sunday, all adults who have not yet received the vaccine will be vaccinated en masse in a study similar to that in other Brazilian cities such as Serrana and Botucatu, both in São Paulo state.
Vaccination in the country continues to progress slowly, with only a quarter of the population receiving a single dose, while just over 11% have been fully vaccinated.
