www.ticketnews.com: After seeing the planned 50th anniversary Glastonbury Festival pushed to next year by the coronavirus pandemic, organizers are exploring every avenue for holding the 2021 edition, including massive testing for the virus. The annual event in England is scheduled for June, but uncertainty regarding how the pandemic will impact large scale events is likely to weigh heavily on planning, both for organizers and potential attendees. Testing people before they arrive could be one road to holding the event at scale, and safely.
3 comments:
I am all for innovative ideas surrounding Covid and tryin whatever avenue we can to create the art we so dearly miss, but I really do not think massive testing is the answer. I want more than anything to be able to go to Bonnaroo next year, trust me, but if they tried to do it while cases were still on the rise and said that massive testing was their strategy, I would not go. There is a bunch of evidence that says testing only strategies do not work. Just look at the Rose Garden super spreading event. Those were some of the most heavily tested people in the world, and it still led to a huge outbreak that infected countless people. Testing is inaccurate at best, and only serves to alert people of when they have the disease. It does not do much at all to actively slow the spread. I hope Glastonbury can figure something out that is better than this, because if this is their plan, it will lead to a lot of people getting sick.
I really don't think this is a practical solution to COVID. I know that people are desperate to get back to normalcy and seeing live music. But I think that this is just so impractical and inefficient. First, while this works in theory in real life it will be very hard to implement. There is a risk of exposure the time between testing and the concert itself and what that many people it would be very hard to trace. Second, the amount of money this would take by creating a lab and ordering tests and hiring people to do this would be so exponentially high. Finally, there are so many people in the United States and the world who don't have access to proper testing. It is really sad to me that a private organization could do this but so many people need financial support for medical care. I don't think this is a good solution at all.
I found it very difficult to read this article, particularly as the United States reported 90,000 new cases today alone. The notion that we will be able to safely return to in-person, large-scale events in June of 2021 is not only unthinkable, it’s unconscionable. As many Artistic Directors, Managing Directors, and Production Managers have found in their attempts to plan for an eventual return to ‘normal’: live theatre will not simply return when it is physically safe for it to do so. In order to successfully return, audiences members, cast members, production team members, house staff, etc. will need to actually *feel* safe returning to the theatre, and this timeline far exceeds the date when we finally get a viable and fully accessible vaccine. While the steps and safeguards along the way, aided by technology and extreme forethought, are commendable coming from the Glastonbury Festival planning committee, the truth is that there is absolutely no way to make events of this size anywhere near safe. What if a person’s first two tests were negative but the third positive, but they are already at the gate? Are they quarantined there? Did they interact with anyone else who might already be inside the festival? Will they tell you even if they did? There are far too many factors to juggle, and the stakes are too high. Unfortunately, I think that events of this size will need to find another alternative to their testing schema if they hope to return at all when it is truly safe and feasible to do so.
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