For the first time in over a year in the UK, several thousand music fans gathered to legally dance, drink and listen to music at a big event in Liverpool. This is the first in a series of test-events, pilot events promoted by the government and closely monitored by health authorities to see if it is possible to relax the distancing measures without triggering new coronavirus outbreaks. Three thousand participants, who before and after the event underwent the swab.
A “monumental” day, commented DJ Yousef of Liverpool’s Circus nightclub. The UK has overall recorded over 127,000 deaths related to Covid-19, but is gradually loosening restrictions.
Another such event is scheduled at the same venue on Saturday; then on Sunday 5 thousand fans will attend a concert by the Blossoms band at Sefton Park, also in Liverpool. And the test events will culminate on May 15 at Wembley Stadium, where a crowd of 21,000, or a quarter of the facility’s capacity, will watch the FA Cup football final.
It is not the first test of this kind (with pre and post evening swab). In Barcelona, Spain, the concert-experiment with 4,500 people gave good results, in the sense that very few positives were found out of the total number of participants, who may not have become infected in that occasion, also because everyone had a nose and mouth. Ffp2 mask with the obligation to never remove it. Other experiments also took place in Holland.