A thousand people infected with coronavirus at Dutch outdoor festival
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More than 1,000 festivalgoers tested positive for the coronavirus after attending a 20,000-person event in Utrecht on the first weekend of July, leading to the city’s mayor to apologize, Dutch health authorities announced on Wednesday.
Local health authorities say the disease spread over both days of the Verknipt outdoor festival, leading to the highest count of infections that could be traced back to a single event.
The house music festival was a so-called test-for-entry event, meaning that visitors were allowed in only if they could present a QR code that showed they had been vaccinated, held a negative coronavirus test or had had COVID-19 recently.
Dutch caretaker Prime Minister Mark Rutte apologized earlier this week for his government’s quick relaxation of sanitary measures against the pandemic. “What we thought was possible in practice turned out to be wrong after all,” he said on Monday. “We made an error of judgment there, we regret that and apologize for that.”
The number of coronavirus cases jumped fivefold over the past week in the Netherlands, with 51,957 cases registered last week compared with 8,541 positive tests tallied the previous week.
