After being cancelled last year, the Newport Folk Festival will return to the stage starting Friday. As the country experiences an uptick in COVID-19 cases, the Rhode Island festival has adopted some precautions to promote social distancing and decrease the chance of transmission.
This year’s festival will take place over five days instead of its usual three, stretched out to ensure that the grounds maintain a reduced capacity of approximately 50%. Attendees won’t be able to enter the waterfront venue unless they provide proof of a coronavirus vaccine at least two weeks in advance or a negative coronavirus test within 72 hours of the first day of attendance.
Lynn Underwood Cegile, vice chair of the Newport City Council, said that even though masks are not required, she hopes attendees will still take precautions.
“There'll be fewer people there so they can spread the chairs out and people can socially distance,” she said. “But I hope that people who are not vaccinated will get vaccinated, and I hope that they would wear masks if they are in a large group of people.”
Despite an increasing number of cases across the region — in recent days, more than 130 new cases largely among vaccinated people were traced back to another New England tourist destination, Provincetown — Cegile said she’s “not really that concerned” because of the high rates of vaccination.
“Most of the Northeast has a high vaccination rate,” she said. “So I mean, you look at New York, you look at New Jersey, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts. We've been very proactive, and people have been very, you know, amenable to getting the vaccine.”
Newport Mayor Jeanne Marie Napolitano says the festival’s organizers found that less than 2% of ticket holders haven’t been fully vaccinated.
According to the Rhode Island Department of Health, the state’s positivity rate rose to 1% last week from 0.5% the week before, in a state where more than 70% of adults are fully vaccinated. In Massachusetts, cases have been increasing since late June, and the state reported 477 new confirmed cases Thursday.
Representatives of the Newport Festival Foundation, which organizes the folk festival, were not available for comment.
