Festival Hygiene in the Age of Coronavirus

Despite the fact that festivals are held outdoors in nature and fresh air, they’re cesspits. They mean tens – even hundreds – of thousands of people not showering, barely washing their hands, shitting into filthy holes that drop into pits of excretion and sharing backwashed lukewarm ciders with your whole friend group. Pre-pandemic, we didn’t like this but we simultaneously acknowledged it was the only way: a reasonable trade-off for running around fields off our nuts to bands for a full weekend.

General hygiene and germ-spreading during a pandemic is a bit more pressing than just getting pink eye from putting in contact lenses with dirty hands (which in fairness, is quite serious, I knew a girl who did this and had to wear an eyepatch over her gammy eye for a full year). The Download festival pilot was a test for the UK government to see how many people would catch COVID – or not – during a carefully monitored event, with each one of the 10,000 attendees needing to test negative in order to enter.

While the pilot organisers had COVID-19 levels officially supervised, we thought it’d be worth investigating what was going on in terms of general hygiene at the festival and how it compared to the “before times”. 

Wooden posts with gel were planted sporadically about the festival, though a decent proportion of the rugged crowd seemed to have brought their own anti-bac. Before tucking into a burger or coming out of the loos, punters were pulling their own liquid soap out their backpacks and tote bags to give themselves a squirt. Sort of makes you wonder why we didn’t have this before and that maybe it’s something that will remain omnipresent at festivals in the future. But for now, this was still a festival – people were still being disgusting festival rats and intending to not to shower all weekend. 

You had to wear a mask on the way to get into the festival, and when talking to the staff who take tickets and give out wristbands. But as soon as you were banded, you could free yourself completely of your mask. Across three days, I counted the number of punters wearing a mask on two hands. The coronavirus etiquette of greeting friends and acquaintances with at-most an elbow-bump was gone; everyone greeted each other by way of a hug or jumping on them. Total strangers were still grabbing our mouths and attempting to feed us booze and snogs, as is normal British festival behaviour.

For the first time ever, we give you: men queueing for toilets. This is what happens when men are forced to wash their hands after using a bathroom. But honestly, there’s nothing you could do to try to pandemic-proof festival toilets. They were as nasty as ever, probably because this area of ~ hygiene has little to do with the big bad rona. 

On Friday, most people working were wearing masks, but this was quickly abandoned as everyone relaxed into what was supposed to be a normal festival experience. Service workers weren’t behind huge sheets of plastic or wearing their own face shields (and the efficacy of these measures has been disputed, anyway). Those working at the stalls were maskless and just breathing the same air as the festival goers. It made sense though: since everyone they were serving had tested negative and they were more-or-less in open air. 

We witnessed as many moshpits as you would expect at the regular Download festival. The only difference was that people were being even more considerate: helping each other up, not pushing about hard. These were moshpits lite. Across the weekend, increasing numbers of people got involved in them too, almost as if everyone needed permission that moshing was fine to do again.

Absolutely filthy.

@hannahrosewens / @bekkycalverphoto