ATLANTA — Music Midtown is returning to Piedmont Park Saturday, but if you’re planning on attending, there are some new rules.
Festival organizers are requiring a vaccine or negative COVID-19 test to enter.
This is the first big event in the city to make that requirement and kind of a test. The same rules were required for the much larger Lollapalooza in Chicago last week and organizers hope they can repeat the same success here.
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For Music Midtown, tens of thousands of people will be required to prove their vaccination status or show proof of a negative test within three days before entering the festival.
“Honestly, in my opinion, I’m more comfortable with that,” one fan said.
Other fans said they think the event will promote the benefits of being vaccinated.
A premier vocal coach told Channel 2 Action News he thinks that for the safety of the music fans and the artists, expect more requirements like this for big events going forward.
“Music Midtown, that would definitely be something I would be going to if I wasn’t out on the road here,” said musician Robert “Raab” Stevenson.
Stevenson is a vocal coach to top talent in music, and on tour now with Dave Matthews Band, who played in Alpharetta in July.
“I saw people just coming to the shows acting normal like we weren’t even in a pandemic,” Stevenson said.
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Being outdoors and mostly younger people under 30 is one reason the city of Chicago let an estimated 380,000 pack into Lollapalooza. That music festival, over four days and four times as big as Music Midtown, was not a super-spreader event according to the city’s top doctor.
“We would have seen a surge if we were going to see a surge at this point,” said Chicago Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady.
There was not a single recorded hospitalization or death. There, about 90 percent were vaccinated, the other 10 percent would have had to show a negative COVID-19 test.
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To get those numbers even higher here, the city of Atlanta partnered with Music Midtown for a vaccination event in the park over Labor Day weekend. Anyone who got the shot that day got free passes to the festival.
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