The 2021 Navarre Beach Mardi Gras Parade has been canceled, according to a social media announcement Friday from its organizers.
After originally planning to power through the pandemic and move forward with the 2021 parade, Navarre Krewe of Jesters President Charlene Tremor said on Facebook that the group met Wednesday night and ultimately decided to nix the 35th annual affair.
“We were trying to hold out but with the COVID cases and deaths increasing in (Northwest) Florida and the uncertainty of the vaccines it is necessary for the safety of the community, membership and participants to cancel our beloved parade,” Tremor said in the early-morning post.
Navarre Beach’s parade had been scheduled for Feb. 6, 2021. In the same social media post, Tremor announced the parade will return in 2022 with a set date of Feb. 19.
Since the first week of December, when the krewe reiterated that the Navarre Beach parade would go on as planned, the percentage of positive COVID-19 cases in Santa Rosa County has spiked multiple times.
The month-long high for positive cases in Santa Rosa peaked at 25.87% on Dec. 15, according to state reports. That figure had hovered at about 17% in early December.
“The rise in cases in Santa Rosa County, and different friends and family members that have actually contracted it, just brought further to light that we need to protect the community,” Deb Sinagra, the krewe’s membership chairwoman, said in a Friday phone interview. “Although it won’t be good for the businesses, we had to think of the community as a whole.”
Through Wednesday, the same day the krewe came to its bittersweet decision, a total of 9,270 people in Santa Rosa County had tested positive for the virus since the start of the pandemic. Of those, 9,157 were Florida residents.
As of that date, the state had verified 114 deaths due to COVID-19 complications in Santa Rosa County.
Sinagra said this year’s parade was always on a tentative basis. The krewe said a cancellation decision in mid- or late-December was always a possibility.
“If the numbers and everything else get worse (or) persist, then we’ll cancel, that was always in the back of our mind,” Sinagra said. “Did we want to cancel? No. But you have to look at the bigger picture.”
