Music fans in Barcelona offer themselves up for a COVID-19 concert study

Back in the summer, researchers in Leipzig, Germany, conducted a test of how COVID-19 might be transmitted during an indoor concert. The results were interesting.

On Saturday (December 13), a thousand music fans volunteered for another study in Barcelona. After everyone was given an antigen test, five hundred were randomly selected to attend a concert event while the other 500 were sent home to act as the control group. Those who attended the concert–who wore face masks and encouraged to use hand sanitizer but weren’t forced into social distancing restrictions–will be monitored for COVID-19 symptoms.

The goal is to see if there is any contagion that happened inside the concert hall despite all the screenings. A much more accurate test will be administered on Sunday to see if any infected people managed to make it through the original test. Do the rapid COVID-19 tests work well enough for use in large public gatherings? We’ll see.

The study, which was organized by The Fight AIDS and Infectious Diseases Foundation at the Sala Apolo Theatre. More at The Daily Mail.