Encore? For the third time, the Coachella Music and Arts Festival has been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Via Billboard, Coachella’s sister country festival Stagecoach Country has also been pushed back.
Coachella takes place almost every year in Indio, California. Last year’s event, scheduled for April, was meant to be headlined by Rage Against the Machine, Frank Ocean, Travis Scott, and Lana Del Rey, before the novel coronavirus waylaid those plans. It was optimistically pushed to October, but that idea only lasted until June before the raging pandemic made it shutter once again. In the process, 2020 became the first year without a Coachella in twenty years.
Festival organizers hoped to bring it back this year April 9th-11th and 16th-18th. But even that proved overly sanguine, as the virus is still killing an average of 3,500 people a day in the United States. On January 29th, Riverside County public health officer Dr. Cameron Kaiser pulled the plug, signing a public health order cancelling both Coachella and the Stagecoach Country Music festivals.
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There’s no decision yet on when they may be back, but later this year is a good bet. In fact, for nine months now we’ve known that concerts couldn’t safely return until fall of 2021, with health care experts and Dr. Fauci warning us that the vaccine rollout would take that long. Fauci recently said that we might see face mask requirements through the end of the year, and while that should help with the coronavirus, it might not stop Coachella from being a herpes superspreader event. Still, if you really miss the California festival, you might check out the 2020 documentary Coachella: 20 Years in the Desert.
Editor’s Note: Join us in the fight to protect live music by picking up our new original shirts. A portion of all proceeds go towards independent music venues in their recovery efforts.
Please read the updated link for the Public Health order here: https://t.co/Vvb7s61AGO
— Dr. Cameron Kaiser (@RivCoDoc) January 30, 2021