After three-year break, Coachella music festival is back

Coachella, California’s famous desert music festival, will open on Friday for the first time since 2019, with hundreds of thousands of people expected to attend as Covid-19 cases rise in the United States.

The massive festival, which spans two three-day weekends and features Billie Eilish, Harry Styles, and the Weeknd, as well as EDM sensations Swedish House Mafia as headliners, customarily starts off the summer concert season.

Coachella’s 2020 edition was cancelled as the coronavirus epidemic reached its peak, resulting in two years of chaos, postponed events, and lineup changes.

Coachella is a benchmark for the multibillion-dollar touring business, which is on on precarious ground following recurring catastrophic failures, as it returns after a three-year absence.

Coachella declared this winter that it will not need any such mitigating measures, such as masks or social separation, after other large-scale events, such as Lollapalooza last year, demanded proof of vaccination or a negative Covid-19 result.

The festival is largely held outside, with 125,000 visitors every day arriving from all over the country and overseas, many of whom camp and fill adjacent hotels.

On the event grounds, there will be two testing locations. There will also be bolstered testing facilities nearby, according to Jose Arballo, a senior public information officer for the public health agency of Riverside County, where Coachella takes place.

“There are always concerns when huge numbers of people meet in public places,” he told AFP. “But we’re hoping that more people will get vaccinated… and that more people will wear masks anyhow.”

“We hope people can forego attending if they aren’t feeling well, even if it means they will lose money.”

“Other individuals will be coming in from all over the nation and other locations in the globe where maybe the case rates aren’t that low,” Arballo said, adding that case counts in the county have “plateaued in the previous several weeks.”

He also mentioned that unreported at-home testing may have biassed case rate data downward, and predicted that the county will be ready to analyse the festival’s public health impact by the middle of next week, just in time for the festival’s second run.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Covid-19 instances are down dramatically from January levels, but have lately begun to rise, with the United States averaging around 38,000 cases per day.