Curfews, quarantines, and even border crossings complicated Christmas celebrations for people around the planet on Friday, though ingenuity, determination, and imagination helped make something special of the day for many. .
In Beijing, official churches abruptly canceled Christmas Day masses at the last minute, after the Chinese capital went on alert following the confirmation of two cases of VOCID-19 last week, and that 2 asymptomatic cases be identified on Friday. The Church of St. Joseph in Beijing, built by Jesuit missionaries in the 17th century, was one that displayed cancellation notices.
Border closures prevented thousands of migrants fleeing the economic debacle in Venezuela from returning home for Christmas from Colombia. The Colombian government closed the crossings in an attempt to curb the contagion. Those trying to return home for the holidays this year had to resort to smugglers.
Yakelin Tamaure, a nurse who left Venezuela two years ago, would not return home and said there would be no gifts or new clothes for her two children, ages 10 and 15. Tamaure explained that she has not been able to find a job as a nurse because she does not yet have a residence permit in Colombia. His parents are still in Venezuela.
She was also worried because her mother had broken her foot, and although she was trying to send him money, it was not the same as being with her.
Others managed to cross the border, but were quarantined. On their first Christmas since they were married in March, Nattasuda Anusonadisai and Patrick Kaplin were locked in a Bangkok hotel room. It wasn’t too much fun, but they had made sure to get a Christmas tree.
This month they returned earlier than planned for a four-and-a-half-month trip to Canada and the United States, making a 32-hour trip from Montreal with a stopover in Doha. A condition for entering Thailand is to make a quarantine of 14 days on arrival. Thai citizens have free accommodation in state centers, but foreigners like Kaplin, who is Canadian, have to pay to stay in an authorized hotel, the option the couple chose to be able to stay together.
“The hotel was surprised that we ordered a big Christmas tree, but they didn’t give us much trouble to bring it,” Anusonadisai said. But they had not ordered enough ornaments, so they put on objects they had brought from their travels, such as an eagle feather and, of course, masks.
“Now we will continue this tradition, it’s nice to see so many personal memories in the tree,” Kaplan said.
In the populous Seoul, capital of South Korea, outbreaks of infection have been reported in churches, hospitals, residences, restaurants and prisons. The South Korean Agency for Disease Control and Prevention reported 1,241 new cases of coronavirus on Friday, a record for the country.
Song Ju-Hyeon, who lives in Paju, near Seoul, and is expecting a baby for February, said she now only feels safe at home.
“It doesn’t feel like Christmas anyway, it doesn’t feel like Christmas on the streets,” he said.
“It’s Navimáscara,” the Daily Nation reported in Kenya, where the second wave of cases has subsided and the brief doctors ’strike ended on Christmas Eve. The celebrations were discreet in the commercial core of East Africa, as the curfew prevented church eves. The media said fewer people had also traveled to visit their families, which could limit the spread of the virus to even worse-equipped rural populations than cities to manage the outbreak.
In Paris, members of the Notre Dame Cathedral choir, wearing helmets and protective suits – not against COVID-19, but for works on the medieval monument devastated by fire in 2019 – sang in church for the first time. time since the fire.
In a special Christmas Eve concert, accompanied by a famous cellist and a leased organ, the singers maintained the social distancing to perform under the stained glass windows in the darkened church, where dangerous debris removal works are giving way. to the enormous reconstruction tasks. No public entry was allowed, and no visits are expected inside the building until at least 2024.
In Rome, confinement measures prevented the faithful from gathering in St. Peter’s Square, where other years thousands of people received a pope’s blessing and heard his traditional Christmas message. But anyway, they could not have seen Pope Francis. In response to a resurgence of viruses in Italy, the pontiff had canceled his appearance on the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, and chose to deliver his annual message on global issues from within the Apostolic Palace.
Elsewhere, Christmas was a difficult time. Thousands of drivers were stranded in their trucks in the English port of Dover because the coronavirus tests France had begun to require to cross the English Channel had not been done. Many seniors faced travel restrictions that prevented them from receiving visits from friends or family for the holidays.
In Spain, Álvaro Puig, 81, said he felt lonely and often depressed.
“Loneliness gives me sadness and these holidays, instead of giving me joy, give me sadness, I hate them,” said Puig, who spent Christmas night alone with his pet rabbit.
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AP journalists around the world contributed to this office.