With Coronavirus pandemic making huge waves across the world, people are requested to not come off of their houses. The music industry has lost billions of dollars is the last few weeks and musicians are just waiting for the day when COVID-19 ends.
With hundreds of tours currently postponed, fans are expecting the concerts to resume sometime later this year, which sadly seems to be not possible.
Dr. Ezekiel “Zeke” Emanuel, a special adviser to the director-general of the World Health Organization, has once again said that he doesn’t anticipate it to be safe to return to concerts, sporting events and other mass public gatherings for another 18 months.
He said:
“If 1% of the population has COVID-19 and half are asymptomatic, that’s 250 people in a stadium of 50,000, all touching chairs, eating food, talking and jumping and shouting. Is there is a better place for spreading disease?”
“Going back to those situations, for all of us who love concerts, it’s hard to see how to do that without a vaccine.”
He added:
“We’ll begin opening up with social interactions while wearing face masks. If we’re probably bending the top of the curve, [that’s] four to six weeks at the absolute earliest.”
With more time and testing, “maybe you can later have a venue of 2,000 people where you put in 500 and spread them out with masks and protection. But you’ve got to vaccinate 70% of the population to get back to pre-COVID, and you may have to shut down some businesses that reopen. It’s a roller coaster, and you want those hills to be as gentle as possible.”