Lollapalooza requests a vaccination card or a negative test to attend the festival: NPR

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David Shaw of The Revivalists performs at Lollapalooza 2019. Amy Harris/Amy Harris/Invision/AP Hide caption

Switch Caption Amy Harris / Amy Harris / Invision / AP

David Shaw of The Revivalists performs at Lollapalooza 2019.

Amy Harris / Amy Harris / Invision / AFP

CHICAGO — The hordes of people expected to descend on Chicago’s Grant Park for this week’s Lollapalooza music festival will be required to show evidence that they have been vaccinated against COVID-19 or have tested negative for the disease within the past three days.

The four-day festival begins on Thursday and is expected to return to full capacity, with approximately 100,000 people attending each day. Having lost it last summer to the threat of the coronavirus, it will easily be the largest gathering in Chicago since the pandemic began, and one of the country.

This year’s festival will look very different than it did in the past. To enter, attendees will need to present their vaccination cards or a hard copy of a negative COVID-19 test that is no more than 72 hours old. This means that anyone who has a four-day pass and has not been vaccinated will be screened twice. Furthermore, anyone who has not been vaccinated should wear a mask.

Public health officials and others have raised concerns that such a large gathering, even outdoors, risks turning into a super-spreading event. Officials in the Netherlands were shocked after a much smaller music festival attended by 20,000 people over two days early this month led to nearly 1,000 cases of COVID-19, CNBC reported. This festival had similar safeguards to the Lollapalooza Festival.

Despite the recent surge in cases caused by the highly contagious delta variant, Dr. Alison Arwady, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health, said this week that she was comfortable with Lollapalooza continuing as planned because of the precautions regulators were taking, saying they had gone “to extremes”. . In addition to entry requirements, organizers have considered air ventilating any indoor spaces, making sure backstage workers are vaccinated, masks are available, and will test ticket holders.

“I wouldn’t feel comfortable going forward with Lollapalooza without the COVID protocols in place,” Arwady said. “I don’t think I would feel comfortable if this was an indoor event either. And frankly I don’t think I would feel comfortable if we were sitting in Louisiana right now, where the cases look like.”

Although the number of new daily cases in Chicago has risen, from 104 per week a week ago to 176 as of Wednesday, the city has not experienced the kind of surge that other parts of the country have seen in recent weeks, and its average daily number of deaths. Hospitalization decreased slightly.

“We take COVID very seriously,” Arwady said.

At the same time, “When you have this many people coming through, there will almost certainly be some cases. But I am confident that combining what we know about risk reduction outdoors, pairing that with vaccination or testing and vaccination in the ideally overwhelmed, which is what we would expect, plus all the other mitigating factors.”

Lollapalooza officials did not immediately respond to a request for more information about the process of his display, but on the festival’s website, they say there will be people manning each entrance to search all the bags that attendees carry as well as make sure no one is allowed inside carrying anything. Other than small bags, handbags and drawstring bags.

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