Lollapalooza how many

Lollapalooza took over Grant Park almost two weeks ago with an estimated , people from across the country attending the four-day music festival. One day after leaving the festival to return home, however, she said she began showing mild symptoms. I was just like really, really hot. Just did not feel great. Michael Andres from Chicago attended the festival on Thursday and experienced mild symptoms three days later, losing his sense of taste and smell.

He said he knows it could have been much worse. Andres took an at-home test confirming his positive diagnosis. Tens of thousands of people showed up daily to the festival, which did not require masks, vaccinations or negative tests. Their infections coincided with a larger spike in Florida at large, in which COVID cases and hospitalizations have risen dramatically.

Critics of Lollapalooza are worried that the festival spread COVID in two dimensions: first in the Chicago area, and second, everywhere people travel back to after the weekend ended. Lollapalooza is a commuter festival—set in the middle of downtown Chicago, with many festivalgoers arriving by public transit from other parts of the metropolis. This weekend, buses and trains on the Chicago Transit Authority CTA were jam-packed with a mix of unvaccinated festivalgoers and essential workers returning to in-person work, every day of the festival.

If the festival turns out to be a superspreading event, there could be significant trickle-down effects. Others are more concerned about what happens when the festivalgoers return home to places with lower vaccination rates.

But it will be difficult for health officials to track those people if they arrive and leave by car. Chapple-McGruder says. Noah Zelinsky, who is 21 and from Chicago, attended the festival with his friend Savanna Savoy, 18, who drove down from Minnesota to attend. Speaking to TIME before the festival, they said they had friends flying into Chicago for the festival from across the east coast, and that they were both vaccinated and eager to return to live music—a once-essential aspect of their lives—despite the widespread consternation about the festival they saw online.

Images from the weekend all but confirmed this. Chapple-McGruder recommended that festivalgoers wear their masks outside and particularly in crowded spaces, find less-crowded places to eat and take public transit during off-peak hours.

Meanwhile, nearby businesses contemplated the risk-reward ratio, with some taking the plunge into opening up to a wider, more maskless clientele for the potential economic benefits. Physicians and various local health departments urged participants to get tested for COVID as soon as possible following the event.

Many health experts feared the event — which attracted out-of-state visitors from potential COVID hot spots — would spur a spike in cases. Marc Sala, a pulmonologist and critical care specialist at Northwestern Medicine, told the Chicago Tribune recently. Illinois Gov. Pritzker had been scheduled to attend Lollapalooza but then backpedaled at the last minute, citing the spread of the variant.

Some festivalgoers believed entrance checks were too quick to be thorough. During the festival, a mask requirement was imposed, but only for indoor spaces. Masks were distributed at some locations. Some participants reported that mask guidelines were generally ignored in indoor spaces such as bathrooms, despite signs posted at these locations.