Mixed results at Vida and Canet Rock festivals

BarcelonaYes, the audience of Oques Grasses received the sun on Sunday at Canet Rock and the desire to dance in the open air spread throughout the Vida Festival on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Once inside the concert venue, everything was almost the same as before the pandemic, except that the public had to wear the FFP2 masks provided by the organization (in practice, their use was rather relaxed). For months work had been done to create safe environments from the health point of view and the experience of the pilot concert at the Palau Sant Jordi convinced the Government, which with the authorization of the Procicat gave the go-ahead to the three festivals with prior antigen screening ( the third is the Cruïlla). But not everything went as planned.

Vida and Canet Rock hired AINA Group, a company in the events technology sector, to manage the application that collected and communicated the information from the antigen tests. The same company was also in charge of the health and logistical staff needed to do the screening. The application failed on the first day of Vida, resulting in queues of more than three hours. There were also connectivity problems. The Vilanova festival, which had a hundred health workers to do about 10,000 tests a day, changed the access system for the next two days, which took place without incident and with more reasonable queues of between fifteen minutes and an hour.

With the experience of Vida, Canet Rock discarded the application and quickly adopted another system in which the health staff did the test and communicated the result directly to each spectator; if it was negative, they put a bracelet that, along with the ticket, guaranteed access to the festival. The Canet Rock had hired AINA Group half a thousand people for the fifteen screenings spread throughout Catalonia: 149 nursing staff, 78 auxiliary nurses, 21 health workers for incidents and more than 200 in logistics, coordination and access control. In the sports pavilion of Canet de Mar they had to operate 42 points of tests but, according to sources of the festival, only 30 were opened. And in the screening mounted in Tàrrega, of "the nine people who were committed to the contracted service only three showed up". The most delicate point was Canet de Mar, also because there were spectators who did not respect the appointment time or went despite having made the reservation at other points. In any case, the festival did not foresee a more efficient system and did not organize the queue by booking time. In the end, more than three hours of waiting.

As for the results of the screening, of the 22,330 antigen tests done at Canet Rock, 152 were positive. The Vida will communicate the data this Monday.