Massive interest in Covid-safe festival experiments

Netherlands residents are massively interested in participating in two experiments to see whether festivals can be arranged safely in the coronavirus pandemic. Over 63 thousand people signed up to participate within hours of the two experiments being announced. 

"It really exploded. We did not know what hit us," Pieter Lubbers of Fieldlab, an events sector organization which is organizing event experiments with the government, said on Jinek on Monday. "This shows that people really need it."

On Monday, Fieldlab announced that a dance festival and a pop festival will be held in Biddinghuizen, on the Lowlands site, on March 13 and 14. Each festival can have 1,500 attendees, split into groups of 500 people. Which means that many of the interested people will have to be disappointed. "We will have to choose," Lubbers said.

Fieldlab is organizing multiple experiments with events with the government. The first, a conference for the events industry, was held in the Beatrix Theater in Utrecht on Monday. 

"It is really incredibly important for people to see that we are thinking about whether some things are possible again," State Secretary Mona Keijzer of Economic Affairs, who also attended the conference on Monday, said on Jinek. According to her, the Netherlands is the first country in Western Europe to conduct such large-scale experiments. "By allowing these tests to continue, we as government show that we want to think about the future."

Those attending the experimental events must be test negative for the coronavirus no more than 48 hours before the event. At the door, they will be sanitized and their temperature will be measured. Inside, motion sensors will track attendees' movements to see how much contact they have with each other. And all attendees will again be tested for the virus five days after the event. 

Reporter Hans Schutte also attended the conference in the Beatrix Theater on Monday. "I had forgotten how much noise a few hundred people can make," he said to RTL Nieuws afterwards.