Chicago’s Heath Commissioner announced there is no evidence that the city’s four-day Lollapalooza music festival had a substantial impact on COVID-19 rates.
Dr. Allison Arwady, the commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health, said today that there is no evidence that the city’s four-day Lollapalooza music festival was a super-spreader, that a grand total of 203 cases could be traced back to the festival, that four out of every 10,000 vaccinated attendees have reported testing positive, and that as of yesterday, no hospitalizations or deaths had occurred among any attendees.
“There’s no evidence of substantial impact to the city of Chicago’s epidemiology,” Arwardy said.
That is not the consequence that many public health experts and media voices predicted.
It has now been two weeks since Chicago hosted the first day of the four-day Lollapalooza music festival – an event that USA Today reported experts called “a recipe for disaster.” Time magazine declared, “critics of Lollapalooza are worried that the festival spread COVID-19 in two dimensions: first in the Chicago area, and second, everywhere people travel back to after the weekend ended.”
Never mind the fact that 90 percent of attendees showed proof of vaccination, and that the remaining showed proof of a negative COVID-19 test taken within the past three days. The event brought more than 385,000 people through the gates over the course of the four days.
Not all Lollapalooza attendees live in Chicago, and not everyone who lives in Chicago who tests positive for COVID-19 attended the festival. But one would figure that if there was one demographic within the city that is most likely to reflect the impact of a super-spreader event at a four-day music festival, it would be Chicago residents from ages 18 to 29.
According to the most recent data collected by the city, in the eight days before the festival began — July 20 to July 28 — Chicago had 466 new cases among those age 18 to 29 — a daily average of 58.25 cases. During the four days of the festival, Chicago reported 285 new cases among those age 18 to 29 – a daily average of 71.5 cases. And in the eight days after the festival ended — August 2 to 10 — Chicago reported 909 new cases among those age 18 to 29, for a daily average of 101.
The average daily number of new cases among Chicago’s young people increasing from around 58 to 101 is not good news. But it hardly qualifies as evidence of a super-spreader. Chicago has roughly 562,000 residents 18 to 29.
Chicago’s hospitals are not overrun – 17 percent of ICU beds are available, and of the 856 ICU beds in use, 77 percent are occupied by non-COVID-19 patients. Roughly 18 percent, or 1,298 non-ICU beds are unoccupied. Almost 80 percent of those patients in the 5,715 occupied non-ICU beds are not COVID-related.
Arwady emphasized that nearly all of the hospitalized patients in Chicago are unvaccinated.
The upshot is that gatherings of the vaccinated are extremely safe, whether large or small, and gatherings of the vaccinated and the recently-tested-negative are pretty safe. This applies to presidential birthday parties, big concerts, sports events, or your gathering with your friends.