‘This is a public health issue’: can Covid-era music festivals ever be safe?

After backlash over the 100,000-plus crowd of mostly unmasked faces at Chicago's Lollapalooza, festival organisers reckon with a safe way forward

It could have been an image from 2019 - a sea of mostly unmasked faces, shoulder to shoulder, singing to live music in Chicago's Grant Park. The mass gathering of about 100,000 people daily for Lollapalooza 2021, one of the country's most prominent music festivals, featuring Foo Fighters and Post Malone, on the last weekend of July was a welcome sight to music lovers - and a worrisome event for public health officials as cases of the Delta variant of Covid-19 surge in the US.

The photos now appear like the last naive gasp of pandemic-free fantasy; in the two weeks since Lollapalooza, which required either proof of vaccination or a negative Covid test to attend, the rapid spread of the Delta variant has forced a slate of upcoming music festivals to reassess health and safety plans at a pivotal moment for handling of the pandemic in the US.