Festivals, are entry requirements hogwash?

[Dollyparton3]

We have a teenager in the house who is off to Reading next weekend and his mates are dropping like flies with COVID at the moment.

The Organisers have been very proactive in saying you must provide proof of a lateral flow test on the day of the event or be double jabbed in order to gain entry. Sounds sensible.

However aforementioned teen says that other recent festivals have been a COVID mosh pit due to the lateral flow proof being a case of you going into the NHS app and "self reporting" that your test result is negative. So if you're so inclined and had COVID, you'd report it as negative just so you don't have FOMO all weekend.

Concerned as one of his mates has COVID at the moment which means he should be isolating past the event but apparently he thinks he'll be fine by then so will just report that he's clear. Surely loads of people will do the same.

The organisers insist on a test 72 hours after entering the festival but this bit seems so wooly to me unless I'm missing something?

According to DS there is a photo going round Instagram showing a positive LFT on the ground at Reading festival!

Boardmasters is very popular with 16/17 year olds, so many of them are likely not to have been vaccinated at all.

Will be very interesting to see what happens post-Reading among DS's friends. He's been double vaxxed but most of them only have just had one dose. On the other hand, they've been in the thick of it in SW London for 18 months and a lot have had Covid so I'm assuming many or all have antibodies. I wonder, where did the Boardmasters attendees travel from? If it is a low prevalence area does that make festival spread inevitable?

Surely if you want to fake a LFT, you just don't swab when doing it? Of course I've never done that, but it's hardly difficult...

Would make more sense to have people turning up in timeslots and making them do LFT on arrival and show the actual test kit as proof

Even then, someone who wanted to fake it would presumably not do a proper swab.... Unless you have a nurse sticking the swab stick down people's throats to their tonsils, and then rubbing up their noses too, you're never going to have reliable tests.

In response to OP, yes it's just nonsense.
You input the serial number of a test, say it's negative and boom, you've got a 48 hour pass.

Complete waste of time.

Good morning. So we came back early from the festival on Sunday as the aggro was too much. Boys kicking off left right and centre. I spoke to security and undercover police and they said there were dodgy pills going around which was causing massive aggression in people. The toilets in accessible were not great but were cleaned regularly so I can't moan. Yes I can tell you now we found several positive LFT tests on the ground between stages. If someone gets a positive lft and they've paid £250 for a ticket they are not going to leave the festival and be sensible. They would probably write it off as a false positive because they feel fine. There is just no control over this :(

@HalzTangz

I thought you could only enter PCR result in NHS app, for LFT I was under the impression you had to show an email confirming the negative result (though people could still register a negative result to get the email)

Would make more sense to have people turning up in timeslots and making them do LFT on arrival and show the actual test kit as proof

LFTs you register too. You go to the website, scan the QR code and then you click whether it is positive or negative. Once registers you get an email back. This can be linked to your NHS app - its one of the ways you can get an events covid pass.

We were at Standon Calling the same weekend as Latitude (another superspreader event). They had partnered with Imperial College to trial an app they had developed which involved a 2-part process over a few days before the start, including uploading your passport to be verified and then videoing you taking the lateral flow, verification of the test number and uploading the result. They then verified it and sent you a QR code which was scanned on arrival at the site. Sound fiddly but it really wasn't.

If you didn't do the above, you had to pay and do a test when you arrived at the site. I believe there was pretty much a 100% uptake of doing the pre-test though.

I think it worked really well - of course there would have been some that slipped the net (LFTs not being 100% accurate, those who didn't perform the test correctly), but from what I understand there was no significant increase in infections of those who attended.