The Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo will not be a grand event this year because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The head of the Nobel Institute announced on Tuesday that the ceremony, which will be held in December, will be scaled back.

The prize will be announced for 2020 on October 9. It is traditionally presented to the laureate on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of prize founder Alfred Nobel.

Even the venue of the event has been changed. This year’s will be held in the auditorium of Oslo University, which can host only 100 people. Traditionally, the ceremony was held in the main room of Oslo’s City Hall, which can accomodate 1,000 guests.

The banquet usually held in honour of the laureate the same evening has meanwhile been cancelled outright.

In July, the Nobel Foundation announced the cancellation — for the first time since 1956 — of the Nobel banquet in Stockholm for the prizewinners in the fields of medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and economics.

“We want to be in line with Stockholm and underline that this is an exceptional year: it’s therefore good to move the award ceremony to another location,” the head of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, Olav Njolstad, told public broadcaster NRK.

“Secondly, we would not have been able to have more than 200 people in City Hall in a room that can accomodate 1,000, and it would have felt quite sparse,” he said.

It is also not certain whether this year’s laureate or laureates will be able to travel to Oslo to accept the prestigious prize in person, and the Nobel Institute is therefore also considering holding an online ceremony, with an in-person invitation postponed until next year, Njolstad told NRK.

The Nobel consists of a gold medal, a diploma, and the prize sum of 9.0 million Swedish kronor ($1.01 million, 865,000 euros).