Music fans in Barcelona hugged, danced and sang along at a sold-out rock concert on Saturday night after taking rapid Covid-19 tests in a trial that could revive the live music industry in Spain and beyond.
Some 5,000 fans at the show for Spanish indie band Love of Lesbian had to wear masks but social distancing was not required in the Palau Sant Jordi arena.
“It was spectacular. We felt safe at all times. We were in the front row and it was something we’d missed a lot,” said publicist Salvador, 29, after the show. “We are very proud to have had the chance to take part in this. We hope it’ll be the first of many.”
In surreal scenes after a year of social distancing, fans danced up close to one another, but the sea of faces covered in masks showed that things were not quite back to normal.
Following the surge in the spread of coronavirus, from last year many countries had lockdown and social distancing regulations to limit close personal contact with others.
This meant most areas and scenes that would normally attract lots of people were too shut down. These include concerts, discos, restaurants, movie theatres, even schools in some countries, but as development of a vaccine and other faster methods of testing for the virus, countries are looking at ways of slowly getting back to pre-corona normal. Is it possible?
Billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates has predicted that this normal life would not be coming around until at least 2022, when supposedly a bigger percentage of the population across the world has received the covid-19 vaccine.
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