The planet has turned the page of a gloomy year 2020 during an New Year's Eve fatally marked by the coronavirus pandemic.
During his wishes to the French, Emmanuel Macron assured that he would not let an "unwarranted slowness" settle in the vaccination campaign.
Follow the evolution of the situation live.
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2020 is now in the rearview mirror.
And like the rest of the year, the transition to 2021 was marked by the coronavirus pandemic.
The new epidemic waves have indeed forced billions of people to celebrate the New Year in privacy, at home, and to follow the celebrations virtually, after months of restrictions or even confinement.
In France, Emmanuel Macron mentioned, during his wishes to the French, the vaccination campaign, which is starting too slowly for many.
The President of the Republic assured that he would not let an "unjustified slowness" settle.
Follow the evolution of the situation live.
The main information to remember:
- New Years Eve took place in the shadow of the coronavirus around the world
- Emmanuel Macron has promised that he will not let "unjustified slowness" take hold in the vaccination campaign
- The French automobile market collapsed due to the health crisis
A New Year's Eve in the shadow of the coronavirus
Masked crowd in Wuhan but empty beaches in Rio de Janeiro: Many countries around the world have muted New Year's celebrations, entering 2021 on Friday under the influence of the coronavirus pandemic which has claimed more than 1.8 million people dead across the world.
In
Sydney
, Australia's largest city, the famous New Year's Eve fireworks display was fired over the Bay, but with almost no spectators appearing after a recent outbreak of contamination in the north of the city which totals some 150 cases.
In
New York City
, where Times Square usually overflows with euphoric people under a shower of confetti, the Manhattan neighborhood was cordoned off and revelers encouraged to follow the televised countdown from home.
The United States is the country in the world with the highest death toll from Covid.
But United States President-elect Joe Biden, who will take office in January, expressed his optimism in a video interview with ABC just ahead of the New Year: "America can do anything and I am absolutely confident, confident that we will come back and come back even stronger than we were before, "he said.
The outgoing Donald Trump congratulated himself on Twitter that the United States "ended the year with the highest stock market in history".
In
Brazil
, the second country most bereaved by the pandemic, the festivities were canceled this year in Rio de Janeiro, which usually hosts one of the biggest New Year's parties in the world.
The famous Copacabana beach found itself almost empty at the stroke of midnight, with revelers being kept away by the police.
In
China
, thousands of residents of Wuhan, the starting point of the epidemic, fervently celebrated the transition to 2021, just one year after the WHO reported the first cases of coronavirus in this city of 11 millions of inhabitants.
"This is something we can never forget," a Wuhan resident named Xu Du told AFP.
"We were locked up for months (...) but we survived".
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In Paris, deserts Champs-Elysées
Paris has offered the image of its empty Champs-Elysées, when hundreds of thousands of people usually flock there on the last evening of the year.
About twenty police officers stopped the rare vehicles to check the derogatory certificates of the drivers and to issue tickets for the offenders.
France was living a "New Year's Eve" under curfew, exceptionally supervised by 100,000 police officers and gendarmes: all travel between 8:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. - except for professional reasons - was prohibited, any violation of the curfew punishable by a heavy fine.
In Alsace, the evening was marked by a tragedy: a young man of 24 died, his head torn off by a firework mortar.
Another young man was also shot in the face and was hospitalized.
Macron tries to reassure about vaccination
The coronavirus epidemic held a good place during Emmanuel Macron's speech, Thursday evening at 8 p.m.
During his greetings to the French, a tradition which occurs in such a particular context this year, the President of the Republic notably mentioned the vaccine.
"I will not let unjustified slowness take hold," hammered Emmanuel Macron.
Visibly scalded by the critics on the supposed slowness of the vaccination campaign in France, he wanted to reassure.
He also said that he would not let "anyone play with safety and the good conditions, supervised by our scientists and our doctors, in which the vaccination must be done".
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The French car market is collapsing
Torpedoed by the health crisis, the French car market collapsed by 25.5% in 2020, regressing to its 1975 level, according to official figures released on Friday.
Some 1.65 million new passenger cars were put into circulation last year, against 2.2 million in 2019, said the Committee of French automakers (CCFA).
French manufacturers PSA (Peugeot, Citroën, Opel) and Renault have held up slightly better than the market, but their deliveries have nevertheless been cut by 25.1% and 24.9% respectively compared to 2019, while the manufacturers foreigners saw their registrations contract by 26.1%, according to the CCFA.