Finding Waldo in the Lollapalooza crowd is our new super-spreader litmus test

Lollapalooza, failing to read the room, took place in Chicago over the weekend. It was a very bad idea. Over 100,000 were in attendance amidst some of the nation’s highest COVID-19 infection rates yet, thanks to the incredibly contagious Delta variant. And even assuming the majority of festival goers were vaccinated, that doesn’t change the situation’s simple mathematics: a bunch of people will be very sick within the next couple weeks, thereby inevitably transmitting the virus to other people, who in turn et cetera et cetera.

Lollapalooza could become one of the most unnecessary super-spreader events yet, all during a time when our healthcare system is once again straining under immense pressure. Wanna know how unnecessary and bad it was? Just try finding Waldo’s globetrotting ass amidst this aerial crowd photo taken a few days ago. The larger original image, taken by photographer Colin Hinkle, should genuinely make you shudder.

Okay. That does it. Going forward, we declare any upcoming social engagement receive what we will dub the “Where’s Waldo? Test.” The rules are simple: Look at the crowd size around you. Would it be difficult to identify the iconic character amid the surrounding human noise? You should not be at said social engagement, and the event should disperse immediately. Here, following the original Waldo example, we’ve applied it to another recent concert event to see if the new test works:

Okay, it’s pretty easy to find him in this context… but the performance should have been shut down for plenty of other reasons.

Tah dah: the “Where’s Waldo? Test.” Pretty simple, right? It damn well should be, but apparently that’s not the world we find ourselves in these days.

[via Digg]

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