Coachella, California’s renowned desert music festival, will open for the first time since 2019 on Friday. Hundreds of thousands of people are likely to attend despite the COVID-19 cases rising in the United States. The massive festival, which spans two three-day weekends will feature Billie Eilish, Harry Styles, and The Weeknd. It will also have EDM sensations Swedish House Mafia as headliners, customarily starting off the summer concert season.
There was a cancellation of Coachella’s 2020 edition owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. It resulted in two years of frantic cancellations, rescheduled events, and roster shuffles. Coachella is a benchmark for the multibillion-dollar touring business.
No mitigation measures needed for Coachella
Coachella declared that it will not need any mitigation measures, such as masks or social distancing. Other large-scale festivals, such as Lollapalooza last year, demanded proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 result. It nearly has 125,000 visitors every day arriving from all over the country and overseas. On the festival grounds, there will be two testing areas. There would also be testing facilities nearby, according to Jose Arballo, a senior public information officer for the public health agency of Riverside County, where Coachella takes place.
“Any time you have large groups of people gathering in public settings there are some issues– but we’re hoping that more people will be vaccinated… and that more people will wear masks anyway,” he told AFP.
“If people aren’t feeling well, even if it might cost them something financially, we hope they can forgo going.”
Arballo said that case numbers in the county had “plateaued in the last couple of weeks,” but “other people will be coming in from all over the country and other places in the world where maybe the case rates aren’t that low.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of COVID-19 cases in the United States has been steadily declining since January but has recently begun to rise, with the country averaging around 38,000 cases per day. The highly transmissible Omicron subvariant known as BA.2 accounts for the vast majority of new cases.
