LOS ANGELES (CelebrityAccess) — The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival’ and its country music cousin, the Stagecoach Festival, have been canceled for the second year in a row due to coronavirus.
On Friday, officials in Riverside County released a public health order announcing that the two events had been canceled amid the ongoing pandemic.
In the order, dated January 29th, Riverside County public health officer Dr. Cameron Kaisers said:
The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival and the Stagecoach Country Music Festival currently scheduled for April 2021 are hereby cancelled.
The order is issued as a result of the worldwide epidemic of COVID-19 disease, also known as “novel coronavirus” which has infected at least 100,418,923 individuals worldwide in 192 countries and is implicated in over 2,151,547 worldwide deaths as of the date of this order. Riverside County has 266,849 confirmed cases and 2,970 deaths.
This order recognizes that both the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival and the Stagecoach Country Music Festival are music concerts and gatherings of an international scope, attracting hundreds of thousands of attendees from many countries, including several disproportionally affected by the worldwide COVID-19 epidemic.
This order is intended to reduce the likelihood of exposure to COVID-19, thereby slowing the spread of COVID-19 in communities worldwide. If COVID-19 were detected at these festivals, the scope and number of attendees and the nature of the venue would make it infeasible, if not impossible, to track those who may be placed at risk.
Coachella was scheduled to take place over two weekends, starting on Friday, April 9th and extending through Sunday, 18th, while Stagecoach was scheduled for the following weekend from Friday, April 23 through Sunday, April 25th.
This is the second year in a row the two festivals have been impacted by the pandemic. In 2020, in the early days of the pandemic, festival producer Goldennvoice postponed the festivals from their traditional April time slots with hopes of holding the event in October but were later forced to cancel the event outright.
According to Billboard, a source at Goldenvoice has suggested that they may again be weighing a move for the two events to October 2021 but as of yet, have made no official announcement.
