‘A recipe for disaster’
As COVID-19 cases surged in the U.S., Chicago’s downtown was packed for the outdoor music festival Lollapalooza.
CHICAGO – The sight was striking. As COVID-19 cases surged in the U.S. last weekend, the city’s downtown was a sea of mostly unmasked humanity as hundreds of thousands crowded together for the outdoor music festival Lollapalooza.
A chorus of public health experts sounded the alarm about the fast spread of the contagious coronavirus delta variant – even by the fully vaccinated – and the city called for masking indoors, yet more than 385,000 people packed the four-day event.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot defended the decision to hold the festival, citing strict pandemic precautions that required concertgoers show proof of vaccination or a negative coronavirus test and to wear a mask.
Lollapalooza said 90% of attendees on the first day of the event proved they were vaccinated. Lightfoot said hundreds were turned away.
“I feel very good about what we’ve done,” she said Sunday, adding that the event delivered shots in arms. “Thousands of young people have been vaccinated because of Lolla.”
But others fear the fallout of the mass gathering, which attracted people from across the nation.
Tina Tan, a Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine professor, called the festival “a recipe for disaster.” She raised concerns over how well organizers enforced masks and social distancing, and she criticized Lightfoot for suggesting the event would be safe because it was largely outdoors.
“Yeah it was an outdoor event, but it was an outdoor event with over 100,000 people (a day) in a small space,” Tan said. “You’re less able to transmit COVID in an outdoor space, but that doesn’t mean that you can pack 100,000 people into a small, enclosed space where they’re on top of each other and expect nobody’s going to transmit. That’s not how it works.”
It’s too soon to say whether the music festival will go down as a superspreader event, but health experts warn such large-scale gatherings add fuel to the outbreak.
Emily Landon is executive medical director for infection prevention and control at the University of Chicago Medical Center. She said that when Lollapalooza was first announced, “things were looking really good.”
“Americans were still running to get vaccinated, cases were going down, and we didn’t see a lot of delta cases on the horizon,” Landon said.
Circumstances have changed. Vaccination rates nationwide slowed just as spread of the delta variant skyrocketed. The U.S. reported more than 634,000 coronavirus cases in the week ending Wednesday, according to a USA TODAY analysis of Johns Hopkins University data – a case every 1.05 seconds.
At the height of the pandemic in midJanuary, the country was reporting on average nearly three cases per second.
And while Chicago’s new case rate isn’t as high as that of some places, transmission is still considered “substantial” by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The city is reporting an average of 252 cases a day, a a 42% increase from the previous week. About 52% of Chicago’s residents are vaccinated, which health experts say is less than ideal.
Will Lollapalooza be a ‘superspreader’ event?
Local and national infectious disease experts say it’s likely Lollapalooza will lead to a rise in coronavirus infections, but it may be difficult to track amid the surge in cases and decrease in testing.
“It’s going to be hard to tease out whether or not it did spur a rise in cases because they’re already starting to rise,” said Dr. Mercedes Carnethon, vice chair of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “I do expect to see a rise that’s probably fueled by this large event.”
Cases typically begin to emerge 10 to 14 days after a big event, she said, but health officials may have trouble linking them to the festival because many infections could occur outside the immediate area in nearby restaurants, bars, public transportation and hotel lobbies.
A giant festival like Lollapalooza has the potential to do as much harm as the Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota in August 2020, health experts said. About 460,000 people attended the rally, which was linked to hundreds of cases reported across the nation.
Unlike at the Sturgis rally, some COVID-19 safeguards were in place during Lollapalooza. But the sheer size of the event makes it nearly impossible for precautions to be enforced, Carnethon said, and serve only as “a little bit of false reassurance.”
Photographs taken throughout the Thursday-to-Sunday event show almost no concertgoers wearing masks.
“It’s a good start, but especially in a crowd like that, it’s going to be almost impossible to enforce good and consistent mask-wearing,” said Robert Bednarczyk, associate professor of global health and epidemiology at Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. “Looking at how contagious the delta variant is, my concern right now is that you may get a lot of people who end up with a mild infection.”
Landon said Lollapalooza attendees have the responsibility “to take action to protect people around them.” She said many interact with others who are high risk or unvaccinated, not by choice but because of factors like age. Vaccines aren’t yet approved for children under 12, and those with weakened immune systems might not be as protected even if they’ve been fully vaccinated.
She suggested unvaccinated attendees proceed under the assumption that they’re exposed by quarantining and getting tested. For vaccinated attendees, she suggested wearing a mask and getting tested.
“They made the decision to go to this event,” she said, “and now they need to consider that when they’re interacting with others afterward.”
Contributing: Jennifer McClellan Health and patient safety coverage at USA TODAY is made possible in part by a grant from the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare. The Masimo Foundation does not provide editorial input.