• Are concerts really potential Covid-19 clusters if we respect barrier gestures?

  • This is what the government intends to know during a test concert scheduled for the end of May in Paris with 5,000 people tested negatively beforehand and masked during this rally.

  • Comparable events have already proven their effectiveness in other countries, according to epidemiologist Martin Blachier.

    We take stock.

Will the concerts be able to take place again soon without the risk of Covid-19 contamination?

While the government hopes to be able to start reopening cultural establishments within a few weeks, a test concert with the Indochine group and an audience of 5,000 people masked indoors (and 2,500 outdoors) at the Accor Arena in Paris is scheduled for May 29, according to our colleagues from Le

Parisien

.

And if this life-size test with volunteers (who will have to present a negative PCR test beforehand), coordinated by the Prodiss (National Union of Musical and Variety Spectacles), the AP-HP and the Ministry of Health, aims to verify the viability of relaunching concerts under certain sanitary conditions, it would in reality be unnecessary, because its effectiveness has already been proven elsewhere.

Martin Blachier: "There will be no contamination in the test concerts", in #LaMatinale pic.twitter.com/RBumC1w4ZI

- CNEWS (@CNEWS) April 28, 2021

Such is in any case the speech advanced by the epidemiologist Martin Blachier on the antenna of CNews, Wednesday April 28: “You should know that there were ten test concerts which were made like that in Europe and in the United States and, each time, there was almost no contamination.

I even think that today these test concerts are a bit anachronistic, we should already be validating the protocol for reopening these halls.

This is no longer the time for test concerts, we know that there is no contamination there.

"

And the doctor concluded: “There is no mystery about what will happen: there will be no contamination in these test concerts.

"

FAKE OFF

Several countries have indeed organized test concerts in recent months to check the risks of Covid-19 contamination, observed after the fact by testing each member of the public.

The most recent took place in Barcelona on March 27 with a crowd of 5,000 Covid-negative people before they entered.

If everyone wore an FFP2 mask for the duration of the event, no social distancing was respected and dancing allowed.

"There is no sign to suggest that a transmission took place during the event, which was the objective of this study", welcomed one of its organizers, the doctor Josep Maria Llibre. If six people were positive for Covid-19 during the PCR test carried out two weeks after the event, four of them were contaminated outside the concert, according to the doctor coordinating the experiment. "With optimized ventilation, antigenic tests and wearing a mask, we can guarantee a safe space", assures Josep Maria Llibre.

A week earlier, around 1,500 Dutch people had gathered at a two-day test festival near Amsterdam, as

Courrier International

reported

. "Once festival-goers are in the mood, dance and feast, the masks fly off in no time," noted an infectious disease specialist on this occasion - although the risk of contamination is reduced by the fact that all the participants had, again, tested negative beforehand.

A study carried out in Germany in August 2020, through different cases observed within the same concert - spectators seated side by side or with spacing… - in the Leipzig Arena, remains the most telling to this day. The data collected by the researchers from the 2,000 volunteers who tested negative beforehand and were equipped with FFP2 masks and devices to monitor their physical proximity to other members of the public, made it possible to observe the transmission of aerosols as closely as possible.

And to conclude, on the occasion of a simulation including 24 participants "virtually" infected, that the performance halls could reopen under certain conditions: a limited number of spectators compared to the total capacity of places, places seats rather than pits (to limit contact) and a multiplication of entry points, to prevent spectators from spending too much time in the same queue.

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