Mardi Gras parades will be prohibited in 2021 to limit the spread of the coronavirus, the mayor of New Orleans announced Tuesday.
Parades and other festivities leading up to the Christian Lenten season have been a defining feature of the area and are key to the city’s tourism-driven economy.
“Mardi Gras is more than just king cakes and beads. It is a religious holiday, a season of traditions that we celebrate every year, a time that the community comes together in formal, fun, and often unexpected ways,” Mayor LaToya Cantrell said. “With COVID-19 cases increasing around the country, we will have to modify how to observe carnival season to be safe for everyone. … We don’t know what the future holds in store for us.”
William Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told the Los Angeles Times that a winter surge is “inevitable” — though he added that continuing to follow guidelines such as wearing masks and social distancing could dramatically reduce the size of the winter spike. That winter surge would likely occur when Mardi Gras carnival organizations are normally in the throws of parade preparations.
A number of carnival groups, including Krewe Du Vieux and Phunny Phorty Phellows, had already announced that they would not participate in a 2021 parade ahead of the mayor’s prohibition.
Instead of parades, Cantrell’s office is seeking suggestions from the public on how the city can celebrate. The mayor is looking for ideas that are “realistic, practical,” and speak “to our local traditions and culture,” soliciting ideas for themes, carnival names, and socially distanced events.
The 2020 Mardi Gras festivities in New Orleans were largely blamed for the state’s “unusually high incidence of the coronavirus” early in the pandemic.
A 2017 study from the Data Center found that more than 15,000 jobs in the city were directly related to tourism and hospitality, predominantly with hotels. Roughly 18.5 million people visited the city in 2019 and spent more than $10 billion, according to the city’s tourism website.
Across the United States, more than 11 million people have tested positive for COVID-19, and more than 248,000 people have died from the disease, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The latest surge has led many states to reintroduce coronavirus restrictions and strengthen mask mandates. In Chicago, health officials told residents to “cancel traditional Thanksgiving” plans.
