While we’ve all been desperately awaiting the return of live music, its recent comeback really couldn’t have happened at a more inopportune time. COVID-19 cases are once again skyrocketing in the U.S. due to the heavily transmissible Delta variant coupled with low vaccination rates throughout the country. However, the surge in cases didn’t prevent massive music festivals like Rolling Loud and Lollapalooza from taking place, and the images of tightly packed crowds of concertgoers are going viral, no pun intended.
Photos from Lollapalooza, the four-day music fest attended by roughly 100,000 people last week in Chicago, prompted a load of criticism from Twitter users who expressed frustration and concern that the festival will be a major superspreader event. One viral aerial photo of the crowd even inspired a couple of games of “Where’s Waldo” on Twitter.
In an interview with Business Insider, photographer Colin Hinkle, who snapped the nightmarish Where’s Waldo image, said he took the photo from his balcony to capture the reality of the festival, which contradicted what organizers said would be in place regarding COVID restrictions.
“What I wanted to try to capture this year was while they have all their restrictions in place for this event, I knew that a large group of people in one space was kind of contradicting all of the rules and regulations that were being told ā¦ I wanted to try to show how many people were in one space at one time there, so I was trying to get a shot as many as I could showing the massive crowds all compacted together in very tight spaces,” he said.
Proof of vaccination, or a recent negative COVID test, was required to enter the festival, though attendees spoke on Twitter and Tiktok of the event’s overall relaxed policies, some even claiming people were using fake vaccination cards to get in. In one TikTok, a woman passionately spoke of the lax security, saying the text on vaccine cards and recent test results weren’t being thoroughly checked and claiming she’d heard a man behind her boasting about how he got in with a positive test result.
Hope everyone enjoyed that Limp Bizkit set, at least.
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