The fate of the annual music festival Coachella could face cancellation as Riverside County has just confirmed its first case of the coronavirus. Riverside County public health officer Dr. Cameron Kaiser made the announcement Sunday.
He said RC is under a public health emergency because of a patient who’s considered a “presumptive positive for coronavirus”; after being tested by the Public Health Office.
Even more alarming, the hospital in which this person is receiving treatment, Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage; is a mere 25 minutes from the Coachella festival site in Indio, CA.
Kaiser says his team is assessing whether the infected individual has been in contact with others. The medical team is trying to find out whether more people might have been exposed.
He also says they are yet to make any decisions on the safety of future public events.
Coachella
As of Thursday, Kaiser had said he had not instructed the honchos running Coachella or Stagecoach to pull the plug. But in light of this new development, that could change.
Riverside is the latest county in SoCal to declare a public emergency — Orange and Los Angeles counties have already done so, as a handful of confirmed cases have been discovered in both.
If the showrunners end up canceling Coachella, which kicks off its first weekend of festivities on April 10, it will be a huge blow to the music community.
Headliners like Rage Against the Machine, Travis Scott and Frank Ocean are to perform this year, and tickets have already gone on sale.
The South by South West film festival (SXSW) was axed just last week because of the coronavirus. It seems like it could very much become a reality on the West Coast too.
The alternative would be young healthy people from all over the country attending Coachella possibly becoming carriers of the coronavirus; taking it back home to more vulnerable members of the population.