Count Savannah’s huge annual Fourth of July fireworks celebration as another casualty of the coronavirus.

On Tuesday, Mayor Van Johnson announced the Fourth of July fireworks on River Street will be canceled to minimize the spread of COVID-19. Johnson made the announcement in his regular coronavirus briefing.

Johnson also has proposed the idea of doing an alternate Independence Day celebration.

»MORE: Georgia beaches brace for huge holiday crowds 

Another annual Independence Day tradition — the AJC Peachtree Road Race — has been postponed in Atlanta until Thanksgiving.

Current statewide hospitalizations for COVID-19 dropped by about one-third in the last two weeks, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of data published by the Georgia Emergency Management & Homeland Security Agency.

The decline is significant, but it does not mean that infections are down because Georgia began to reopen at the end of April. There is about a two-week lag between catching the virus and showing symptoms or testing positive.

Hospitalizations for the novel coronavirus stood at just above 1,025 as of Monday, the most recent data available. It was 1,500 as of May 2, the date that GEMA first reported the measure. It began to publish the number on its daily situation report to give the public a clearer picture of the availability of hospital resources, a spokesperson for the agency said.

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